He regularly faces bad guys as a tough guy on the silver screen, but Anthony Mackie apparently can’t stomach a ride through real-life Birmingham, Alabama.
Mackie, the actor who portrays Sam Wilson/The Falcon in Marvel’s Captain America and Avengers movies, said in an interview that Birmingham is “bananas.”
In the interview Mackie lamented that he didn’t get to shoot his scenes for “Avengers: Age of Ultron” in New York City like the cast of the first “Avengers” did.
“I really wanted to go shoot a few days in New York, but we were, like, in Birmingham, Alabama,” he said. “It was like… ‘Why are we shooting here? Why are we doing Atlanta for Birmingham?’”
“Age of Ultron” actually filmed a large portion of the movie in Atlanta, but Mackie used the interview to call out Birmingham instead. A native of New Orleans, the actor did have to drive through Birmingham on his weekend trips home during filming.
Mackie shared one particular Birmingham experience that has stuck with him.
“There was this dude in a truck and he was hauling ass. He was in a Toyota truck, so that tells you what kind of dude he was. Who the f*** buys a Toyota truck? So, he had, like, deer legs hanging out of the back of his truck, like tied up and out. It was like one, two, three, four deer,” he recalled. “Then there was some other animal. It wasn’t a deer. The legs… I don’t know what it was, but it was hanging, like he had it tied from a rack, I guess it was a gun rack, out the back window… Carcasses. Driving. And leaving a trail of blood as he drives down the highway.”
Mackie’s fear of Birmingham was one of a number of varied topics that were covered in the interview. The interviewer for Ain’t It Cool News, who said he was originally from Alabama, called Mackie “one of the most charismatic actors working today.”
Mackie’s portrayal of Sam Wilson/The Falcon is often viewed as one of the many highlights of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” The Falcon has since appeared in “Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “Ant-Man,” and he is scheduled to appear again in the highly-anticipated “Captain America: Civil War,” which comes out on May 6.
It remains to be seen how Birmingham residents will react to the actor’s comments about their city.
