The Spotlight
Danny Ramirez
THE CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD ACTOR PLAYS BY HIS OWN RULES
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
WHEN IT COMES to Danny Ramirez, football’s loss was cinema’s gain. All his life, Ramirez had had one goal. “As a little kid, I was like, ‘There’s only one thing I’m going to be when I grow up, and it’s a pro athlete,” he tells Empire. Alifelong love for soccer led him to play the sport at college in Atlanta, until one day, on crutches and unable to play due to a recent injury, his life changed. “A PA from a film came in to ask if [any of us wanted to be] extras,” says Ramirez. The film was The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Ramirez got to watch its star, Riz Ahmed, try to pull off some slick moves on the pitch. Before that point, Ramirez had never even considered that as a career. “The next day is when I bought all my acting books.” That was over a decade ago. Since then, Ramirez has applied the same approach to acting that he did to being an athlete. “This is a craftbased process,” he says. “In the same way I work on my first touch, I could work on my emotional resonance, or people-watching, or psychology.” Career-wise, he’s gone from strength to strength. The 32-year-old, Chicago-born, Miamiraised Ramirez may not have realised his dream of playing professional soccer as a right midfielder, but he managed to end up on the wing, alright. First, flying in a fighter plane as Fanboy in Top Gun: Maverick, and now as Joaquin Torres, aka the new Falcon, in Captain America: Brave New World. It’s a role that he’s been prepping for some time, as it turns out. “I was already cosplaying it as a little kid,” he laughs, recalling a time when, as a six or seven year old, he fashioned some wings and tried to fly off the second storey of his grandmother’s house in Mexico. “I crash-landed,” he says. “I knocked myself out. My family were like, ‘Dan, you cannot fly.’ With this and Top Gun, I have definitely won that argument.”