AS ANTHONY MACKIE’S SAM WILSON PICKS UP THE SHIELD IN CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD, HE FINDS HIMSELF UP AGAINST NOT JUST A HUGE POLITICAL CONSPIRACY, BUT A CERTAIN ROUGE-HUED BEAST. PREPARE FOR WHAT MIGHT BE THE MCU’S ANGRIEST MOVIE YET…

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

“IT’S REALLY GREAT TO GET BACK TO A HULK THAT IS JUST BREAKING SHIT.”

JULIUS ONAH

The Falcon (Danny Ramirez) and the new Captain America (Anthony Mackie).

The Red Hulk/President Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross (Harrison Ford).

Think of the number six. At first glance, it’s fairly humdrum and meaningless, just another number lost in the infinity gauntlet.

But ask any maths nerd, and they’ll tell you that it’s actually the smallest perfect number. It is considered by numerous numerologists to be the ‘mother’ of numbers. Alan Hansen wore the number 6 shirt for Liverpool. Patrick McGoohan’s character in The Prisoner protested he was a man, not a number; but what a number it was.

And when Anthony Mackie made his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut as Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon, all the way back in 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he was assigned a number on the call sheet, the daily production breakdown that, among other things, lists cast members in order of story import. Have a wild guess what that number was. “I do my best work at number six,” Mackie tells Empire. “That’s my Marvel number.”

And so it’s remained through Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame and The Falcon And The Winter Soldier. But things change. Alan Hansen retired, for one. And Sam Wilson is no longer The Falcon. He is the new Captain America. And so, you’d imagine that when Mackie walked onto the set of Captain America: Brave New World —the 35th MCU film, the fourth of those to bear the

Captain America name, and the first without Chris Evans as Steve Rogers —the call sheet would reflect that with abump all the way to the top spot. Not so.

“I never wanted to be number one on a call sheet,” says Mackie. “I was like, ‘Keep me at number six.’ The idea of being number one isn’t the accomplishment. The accomplishment is seeing Sam Wilson turn into Captain America.”

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You could be forgiven for thinking that Sam Wilson turned into Captain America when an aged Steve Rogers handed him that shield at the end of Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Or if not then, then certainly at the end of the 2021 Disney+ series, The Falcon And The Winter Soldier (FAWS, for short), when, after six episodes of soul-searching, Sam finally embraced the role. But the next step wasn’t set in stone.

“With the Marvel stuff, you never really know what they’re planning on, what’s going to happen,” admits Mackie. “It became a question of what was next? Is there going to be a Season 2, or in what way is Sam gonna exist in the MCU?”

For Nate Moore, one of Kevin Feige’s most trusted lieutenants and executive producer on that show, there was only ever one option, and that was a big, bold big-screen effort, on the same scale as the Steve Rogers trilogy. “It originated off the success of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier,” he tells Empire. “It did feel like the tip of the iceberg.