The 1980s actor Anthony Mackie based his entire career on: “Whatever you did, I want to do that”
While he might be best known for zooming around with a pair of wings in the Marvel Cinema Universe, Anthony Mackie has a very impressive filmography outside of his role as The Falcon.
His film debut was in Eminem’s semi-autobiographical ode to improvised rap, 8 Mile, after which he starred in the Oscar-winning war drama The Hurt Locker, portrayed Tupac Shakur in Notorious, and was recently nominated for an Emmy for his guest spot on The Studio.
One of Mackie’s lesser-remembered non-Marvel outings was 2010’s Night Catches Us, which stars our hero as Marcus, a former Black Panther who returns to his home in Philadelphia in the 1970s. His blossoming relationship with widow Patricia, played by Kerry Washington, is hampered by the continued racial tension of the age and the consequences of Marcus’ time fighting for civil rights.
Also on the cast list for Night Catches Us was Wendell Pierce, best known for playing Detective Bunk Moreland in the highly acclaimed TV show The Wire, once again playing a police officer pressuring Marcus to help him arrest a local gangster (and Marcus’ former friend) by threatening to go after Patricia if he doesn’t.
Pierce and Mackie were born in New Orleans, albeit 15 years apart, and actually crossed paths long before this movie. Speaking to NOLA, Mackie revealed that the older star had visited the New Orleans Centre for the Creative Arts (NOCCA) when he was a student there and took the opportunity to tell his idol just how much he meant to him.
“Wendell’s been a focal point in my career since I was 14,” he said, “When I was at NOCCA my first year, Wendell came and spoke to the students, and it was amazing. I was sitting there, and here was this dude in this white linen suit with this fly cap, this beautiful hat on. So I ran up to him after he spoke, and I was like, ‘I want to be just like you’. He was like, ‘All right, young dude’, and I was like, ‘No. Whatever you did, I want to do that’.”
Despite only making a proper name for himself in the 2000s, Pierce made his acting debut in the 1980s with a minor role in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, playing one of the men who assassinated the titular civil rights leader.
When Mackie would have met him, he would have still been relatively unknown to mainstream audiences, but he almost certainly had a bigger profile among African-American viewers, and the younger actor literally did follow in his footsteps by going on to study at Juilliard, the same school that Pierce attended.
A true journeyman who worked incredibly hard to get to where he is today, Pierce’s story is a Hollywood dream come true. Mackie’s incredible career is testament to just how powerful an influence he has been, and the fact that he got to actually work with his hero must have been a truly surreal moment.
