The one actor Anthony Mackie refused to work with: “I’m not understudying a rapper”
Anthony Mackie has something of a problem at the moment, quite a big one in fact, if you’re an actor, and it’s that Hollywood keeps making him a leading man, in some very high-budget movies, and repeatedly, audiences are going ‘Mmm, yeah, no’ in return.
For one, there was 2025’s Captain America: Brave New World, in which Mackie took on Chris Evans’ role after he retired and passed on the oversized shield in a film which has one of the lowest Rotten Tomatoes ratings of any Marvel movie, struggling to make what it cost to produce back at the box office, despite many praising Mackie’s performance.
And now there’s Desert Warrior, a bizarre, Saudi-funded throwback epic directed by Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ Rupert Wyatt that stars Mackie and Ben Kingsley and is on track to become one of the biggest flops in movie history. Despite that decent cast, the film, which cost $150million to make, brought in a frankly scary $730k in total at the box office after a disastrous production process that eventually spanned four years.
It has led to many believing that Mackie, while an undeniably talented character actor, simply doesn’t have the pull to be the face of a major Hollywood movie, and he’s now likely to be back to what he does best as part of an Avengers ensemble with the enormous ‘yes, you can come, yes, you can come as well’ superhero blockbuster that is Doomsday hitting cinemas at the end of this year.
And perhaps another aspect to his career not quite working out as a ‘top of the poster’ actor is that he reportedly doesn’t have too much of an ego to go with the success he’s had so far, despite being nominated for a host of industry awards for his turns in movies like Kathryn Bigelow’s ultra-tense bomb disposal film The Hurt Locker in 2008 and 2011’s conspiracy thriller The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon and Emily Blunt.
He isn’t even a fan of where the movies are made, decrying Hollywood and not being a fan of Los Angeles at all, instead feeling far more at home over on the other side of the United States. He told Backstage, “I love the East Coast. I love the rude people, I love the diverse food, I love the four seasons, and I don’t mean the hotel”.
But it seems he does have enough pride to know what he will and won’t stand for, because even in 2001, as a young actor fresh from studying at Juillard in New York, when he landed a part understudying Don Cheadle in the play Topdog/Underdog, he refused to go on Broadway with it, because Cheadle was being replaced by music star and occasional actor Mos Def. As he explained, “I’m not understudying a rapper. I went to Juilliard. You wouldn’t ask [American Fiction actor] Jeffrey Wright to understudy Ice Cube”.
Instead, Mackie built up a successful 20-year career in TV and movies, providing supporting roles in films as diverse as Detroit, Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, the rap biopic Notorious and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which he joined in 2014, appearing in six movies and the Disney+ spin-off Captain and the Winter Soldier.
He’s got plenty to keep him busy in getting over the disappointment of the Desert Warrior, though, that’s for sure, with an involvement in 11 different projects on the go, including a film about police brutality with Elizabeth Banks and Jamie Foxx called Signal Hill, and an adaptation of another play, Clybourne Park, with The Hobbit’s Martin Freeman.
