Sam Wilson by Anthony Mackie is set to become one of the key players in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in The falcon and the winter soldierThe next Disney + series that follows its titular Avengers as they continue to fight the good superhero fight. Sam’s new prominence follows closely the character’s path to become Captain America in the Marvel comicsbut it’s also something Mackie has taken very seriously in thinking about what it means to be A main actor in a project.
in a rehundred conversation with SnowpiercerDaveck Diggs on his experiences working in the industry, Mackie described how, while filming various Marvel movies, he couldn’t help but notice how the overwhelming majority of the team working behind the camera were white people.
“We have the power and the ability to ask those questions,” said Mackie. “It really bothered me that I’ve made seven Marvel movies where every producer, every director, every specialist, every costume designer, every personal assistant, every person has been targeted.”
Mackie’s point was less about having to wonder why the film sets weren’t more diverse (that answer should be pretty obvious), but rather about how, as a guide. The falcon and the winter soldierYou are now in a unique position that allows you to openly present these types of questions to the studio with the assumption that your concerns would be taken seriously. Mackie went on to to elaborate about the biggest and most disturbing problem pointing to Black Panther as the only Marvel movie to have a predominantly black production crew, something he attributed to Black Panther being the only Marvel movie with a primary focus on black characters.
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“[Nate Moore] produced Black Panther. But then when you do Black Panther, you have a black director, black producer, black costume designer, black stunt choreographer, “Mackie said.” And I think that’s more racist than anything else. Because if you can only hire blacks for the movie Black, are you saying they are not good enough when you have a mostly white cast?
It’s more than irritating that anything Mackie said is new, novel, or particularly unique to Marvel Studios and its parent company Disney, but he’s absolutely right in saying it, and should say it again. In a post-black Panther World, it can be somewhat easy to forget that the early days of the MCU were virtually devoid of colored characters with particularly prominent roles aside from Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury and respective portrayals of James Rhodey by Terrence Howard and Don Cheadle.
That the first list of suitable Avengers MCUs were literally all white, said a lot insofar as Marvel considered non-white. on-screen representation a priority, and it is only now that the studio is starting to work with the program and move forward with more projects centering colored characters and woman. But at a time when brands and corporations are doing their best to convince the public who believe in diversity, representation and inclusion, putting black and brown faces in front of the cameras (read: presenting them as content to be consumed) is not enough.
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