Anthony Mackie misses Sebastian Stan, but feels no pressure leading Captain America: Brave New World

Anthony Mackie was excited to do a second season of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier “just so me and Sebastian [Stan] can get paid to hang out,” he says in a new interview with RadioTimes.com’s One More Life podcast. “Because it’s like me, him and Daniel Brühl. It’s kind of like the perfect storm of happiness. So… when they decided to go back to the movies, it is what it is, but I don’t have my friends anymore, so it kind of dampens it a little bit.”

Rather than showing up in Captain America, Stan’s Bucky Barnes is next slated to appear in The Thunderbolts. Brühl’s character was last seen locked in the maximum-security prison The Raft, so the Marvel Cinematic Universe might be done with him… or he could also show up in The Thunderbolts, as his character Baron Zemo has ties to that team in the Marvel comics. In fact, Mackie calls that “the hard thing about the Marvel Universe”: “You can’t really go outside of the lines of those comic books,” he says. The actor describes it as a “controlled environment,” because “there’s only so much you can do. There’s only so much creativity you can bring to the table, because Stan Lee gave us so much content.” He adds, “It’s an interesting juggle to be part of that world.”

Still, despite the fact that the castmates he came up in the MCU with—including Stan, Brühl, and of course, Chris Evans—aren’t joining him for Captain America: Brave New World, and that he’s taking up the mantle of Captain America, “I don’t feel like it’s more pressure,” Mackie says. “I always liken Marvel movies to that opening scene in Grease. It’s like going to summer camp. You know, you go back, it’s the same people, some people have gotten fatter, some people have kids, some people have less hair. It’s the same thing, you check in with people, and it’s fun. That’s the best part about it. It’s fun to make these movies, and we’ve really become almost like a family.”

Knowing that Kevin Feige and producers Nate Moore and Louis D’Espositio are at the wheel, “all the pressure is off,” Mackie says. “The best part about it is going into something knowing it’s gonna be a good movie because of the people you’re surrounded with. So I haven’t felt any pressure. I mean, I’ve been having a great time with it.”

Mackie will continue to have a great time with it when Brave New World goes into reshoots this summer, which he is quick to say “isn’t a big deal.” Often when a big-budget movie has extensive reshoots, it’s reported as a warning sign about the quality of the film. “It’s so funny how press works, because every Marvel movie I’ve done has done between six weeks and three months of reshoots. It’s just how it works. All of these big budget superhero movies, all of them do reshoots,” Mackie claims. “When we did Endgame—we did like three months of reshoots on Endgame. It’s always a thing where you shoot what you have, get it into editing, you see what you’ve got, then you come back and you make it better. So it’s just the way the process works. I mean, I’ve done, I guess 8 Marvel movies now, and we’ve done reshoots on all of ’em. So we’re going back in this summer, and seeing what we got, and make it better.”