It took the Marvel Cinematic Universe a while to start integrating people of color into its ranks in a meaningful way. For a long time, the headliners were Iron Man, Captain American Black Widow, Thor, the Hulk, and so on.
Marvel has been making some changing no that front. 2018’s Black Panther was the first MCU movie fronted by a Black person, and featuring a large cast of Black actors. Disney is also at work on Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings and a Blade movie starring Mahershala Ali.
All the same, one of the leading people of color in the MCU, Anthony Mackie (Falcon) thinks there’s a long way to go. “When The Falcon And The Winter Soldier comes out, I’m the lead,” he told Snowpiercer star Daveed Diggs as part of Variety’s Actors on Actors series. “When Snowpiercer came out, you’re the lead. We have the power and the ability to ask those questions. It really bothered me that I’ve done seven Marvel movies where every producer, every director, every stunt person, every costume designer, every PA, every single person has been white.”
"We’ve had one Black producer; his name was Nate Moore. He produced Black Panther. But then when you do Black Panther, you have a Black director, Black producer, a Black costume designer, a Black stunt choreographer. And I’m like, that’s more racist than anything else. Because if you only can hire the Black people for the Black movie, are you saying they’re not good enough when you have a mostly white cast?"
While it’s easy to point to, say, Samuel L. Jackson playing Nick Fury for years and call it representation, if the goal is to build a sustainable Black professional base, it’ll take more than just a couple of people of color in front of the camera. “My big push with Marvel is hire the best person for the job,” Mackie continued. “Even if it means we’re going to get the best two women, we’re going to get the best two men. Fine. I’m cool with those numbers for the next 10 years. Because it starts to build a new generation of people who can put something on their résumé to get them other jobs. If we’ve got to divvy out as a percentage, divvy it out. That’s something as leading men that we can go in and push for.”
Mackie also discussed The Falcon and the Winter Soldier more generally. “We’re shooting it exactly like a movie,” he said. “Everybody who had worked on TV before was like, ‘I’ve never worked on a TV show like this.’ The way in which we were shooting, it feels exactly like we were shooting the movie cut up into the show. So instead of a two-hour movie, a six or eight-hour movie.”
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is the first of Disney’s upcoming slate of Marvel shows, which also include WandaVision, Loki and Hawkeye. Despite Hollywood being disrupted by the coronavirus, Falcon is still set to debut this August on Disney+.
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