The “awful” director Anthony Mackie hated working with: “I won’t say his last name”
When he first donned the wings of The Falcon all the way back in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, few could have predicted that Anthony Mackie would one day become a key part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Mackie’s Sam Wilson has grown from dependable sidekick to main event player. He got his own TV show, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and took over the mantle of Captain America from Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers in 2025’s Captain America: Brave New World. Let’s just ignore those reviews, shall we?
If you want to see Mackie do something other than fly around and drop zingers, then he’s been in plenty of non-superhero stuff, too. He played Papa Doc in the Eminem vehicle 8 Mile, taking part in the film’s climactic rap battle. He played Tupac Shakur in the Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious, Martin Luther King Jr in the TV movie All the Way, and, lest we forget, Will Johnson in the cinematic smash Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Again, let’s just move past that.
Mackie’s talent and determination have brought him plenty of opportunities across his career, but they haven’t always gone the way he would have liked. Speaking to fellow star Tyler James Williams for Variety’s Actors on Actors series, Mackie was asked about the two movies he’d made with Kathryn Bigelow: The Hurt Locker and Detroit. He also took the opportunity to call out another director for almost costing him one of those jobs.
“I was doing this movie that never came out with this awful director, his name was Dan, I won’t say his last name, and we go over by six months. I was supposed to leave to do Hurt Locker. Kathryn was like, ‘I’m sorry. Maybe the next one’. So, they go and offer it to another actor, and he said no. So they came back to me like, ‘Look, we’ll wait, if you leave the day you wrap’. That movie literally started my career, because one dude said it wasn’t enough money.”
In The Hurt Locker, Bigelow’s Oscar-winning Iraq War drama, Mackie plays Sergeant JT Sanborn, a member of an elite bomb-disposal squad. It marked a major turning point in the rising star’s career, bringing him to mainstream attention for the first time. He picked up a nomination for a Screen Actors Guild award and started appearing in many more high-profile pictures off the back of it.
That just leaves the identity of this mysterious ‘Dan’ character. Luckily, it only takes some minor detective work to track him down. Mackie is almost certainly talking about Daniel Pritzker, son of hospitality magnate Jay Pritzker. Mackie had originally agreed to appear in Pritzker’s movie Bolden, a passion project about pioneering jazz musician Charles ‘Buddy’ Bolden. This was the movie that almost cost him The Hurt Locker, and the billionaire heir had never made a movie before, so if he is the subject of Mackie’s complaint, then you can understand why he was so frustrated.
Amazingly, Bolden did eventually see the light of day in 2019, over a decade after Mackie first became involved. The title role went to Gary Carr, and, while it got decent reviews, it failed to gain any sort of traction on the world stage. Mackie was right to leave it behind.
