Are you curious about how Anthony Mackie is preparing to play The Falcon in Captain America: The Winter Soldier?

To be blunt, black actors have gotten a bit of a short shrift when it comes to portraying superheroes on screen – we’ve had Storm and we’ve had Blade, as well as Darwin in X-MEN: FIRST CLASS – a character whose name I barely remembered because he wasn’t really much of a character at all.  And then along came War Machine, Heimdall, and Nick Fury for good measure.  The point is that Marvel is set to introduce a fourth black hero (and character, period) into its shared cinematic universe, a fact which will hopefully soon stop being newsworthy and start being the status quo.

Anthony Mackie is set to join CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER as The Falcon, a character who has been a companion of Cap for many years now.  But why have me tell you about all about it? Mackie is more than jazzed to do that job himself via this interview with Newsday:  “I’m playing the Falcon.  He’s this guy in Harlem who moved to California and became a drug dealer. His plane crashed, and he was genetically altered, and he can fly, has telepathic powers. He’s the first African-American superhero. It makes me feel all the work I’ve done has been paying off. I have a son, nephews and nieces, and I love the idea that they can dress up as the Falcon on Halloween. They now have someone they can idolize. That’s a huge honor for me.”

Mackie has also revealed that he starts training soon, and that he “got his hands on a whole collection of the Captain America and the Falcon comics from the ‘70s, particularly the run written by Steve Englehart that helped define the character.”  And while the backstory described above is part of the fascinatingly complex character creation that intrigued Mackie enough to take the role, “he’s not sure how much of that will be incorporated into the movie version of the character, since he has yet to read a single page of the script even though he’s just as anxious as everyone else to see how The Falcon will be used in the movie.”

Hopefully he’ll get a chance to read that script soon, because production is set to start in March of 2013.  CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER releases on April 4th, 2014.  In the meantime you can catch Mackie in GANGSTER SQUAD on January 11th, 2013, and in RUNNER RUNNER with Justin Timberlake, Gemma Arterton, and Ben Affleck sometime in 2013.