Anthony Mackie on trying and failing to do Falcon’s superhero landing

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Although no one is expecting Anthony Mackie to perform high-flying stunts for real, being a superhero isn't all slick CGI and form-fitting costumes, there's an incredible amount of highly physical work which goes into it. These cinematic heroics take a lot of training, but that's not to say that everything goes off without a hitch.

While speaking with Entertainment Weekly during a panel about a documentary focusing on Julliard faculty member Moni Yakim, Anthony Mackie spoke of the first time he had to pull off a superhero landing as Sam Wilson aka the Falcon.

The Marvel movies were the first time I had to an action thing. My character's the Falcon, so I show up, I sit with the graphics team and the directors, and they're like, 'We want you to land like a bird.' Because you have wings… you have to pull your legs in, swoop your core in, let your wings slow you down, and then land on your feet. Being the weird actor that I am and going back to my mime and clown days, I went and started studying all these birds and the way they land, the way they took off, they way they flew, and all this stuff.

When it came time to perform this feat on the set, Falcon's superhero landing proved to be more difficult than Mackie assumed. "The first day — I think we were doing Civil War, and there's the scene where [Vision] shoots Rhodey out of the sky and I land to see if he's okay — I'm supposed to land, so they pull me up like 30 feet off the ground and I'm on a pendulum, so I'm supposed to pull my legs under me and land to a stop," Mackie explained. "I didn't realize how much my lower body weighed, so I pull on the ropes to try and bring my legs under but I can't get my core in, and I literally land face-first in the dirt and bounce for about 10 feet. I have grass and mud all in my face. The crew is just dying laughing. Everybody is dying laughing." Mackie added that the rest of the day became a "comedy of errors" which "often ended in humorous disaster."

We'll soon be seeing more of Anthony Mackie as the Falcon as he will be starring alongside Sebastian Stan in The Falcon and the Winter Solider, a new TV series which will debut on the Disney+ streaming service. Although the series is destined for the small-screen, Mackie has teased that they're shooting the series exactly like a movie.

We’re shooting it exactly like a movie. Everybody who had worked on TV before was like, ‘I’ve never worked on a TV show like this.’ The way in which we were shooting, it feels exactly like we were shooting the movie cut up into the show. So instead of a two-hour movie, a six or eight-hour movie.

The Falcon and the Winter Solider is expected to premiere on Disney+ later this year, but production still needs to resume in order to finish off the six-episode series.