You can always rely on Anthony Mackie to come up with the best compliments for his male co-stars (Ryan Gosling, you may remember, is “a delicious little petit fourâ€), so when we caught up with Mackie yesterday at the 10 Years brunch thrown by Grey Goose, we invited him to wax rhapsodic about his 10 Years co-star Channing Tatum. He delivered: “Channing has the ass of a 25-year-old black woman.†Has Mackie actually told him this? “Every day,†he laughed. “And I have a posterior, too. We make jokes about it.â€
Mackie won’t have much time to rest on that posterior: He’s about to embark on an 11,000-calorie-a-day diet to play the Falcon in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. “He’s known for his physique. He’s described as 6’3â€, 245 pounds, so starting Monday, for the next five months until we start shooting, I’m going back to high-school workouts and start doing two-a-days, so I get up to 230 pounds.†Sounds major! “I’m going to try not to get a job between now and then, so I can really focus on this. Because Chris Evans is in such good shape! I’m just a dude he dragged into the lab that he injected with some shit, but I got to stand next to him. So we shall see!â€
The character, an ally to Captain America, was a groundbreaking addition to the Marvel comic-book canon as the company’s first black superhero, a fact that wasn’t lost on Mackie’s family. “When I got the part, I called my brother, and I told him, ‘Guess what I’m doing.’ And I told him the movie and who I was playing, and he literally just gave me a litany of history about this character. He went in his closet, and he dug out a copy of the very first Captain America with the Falcon in it. So I said to him, ‘Holy shit, you’re an Ãœber-nerd!’â€
Is Mackie up to the challenge of taking on such a pivotal character? “I feel like every kid deserves a hero, you know?†he said. “And now that Spider-Man is Latino, I’m happy that little black kids are going to have the opportunity to say, ‘Hey, I want to be the Falcon.’ You know? So it’s cool.â€