Original Coverage & Source Attribution: faroutmagazine.co.uk
Anthony Mackie is always good value in an interview, whether he’s joking about how rich his MCU co-star Robert Downey Jr is or busting Sebastian Stan’s balls about spending all his time being pampered with eucalyptus in the spa.
In reality, it’s sometimes difficult to get Mackie to give a serious answer to any question. Still, when journos do catch him in a reflective mood, he tends to be unexpectedly candid and brutally honest about Hollywood as a business, and his role within it.
Interestingly, the guy has also been refreshingly honest over the years about his own mistakes, and if he thinks he’s made a bad movie, he’ll tell you. He won’t go out of his way to name said film, unfortunately, but he’ll be candid about his opinion. For instance, he once told Deadline, “There are two movies on my resume that I’m not proud of at all. I’m not going to say which ones they are, but they are fucking awful.”
So, with that tantalisingly mysterious statement in mind, plus the knowledge that he gave that Deadline interview in 2019, it’s time to do some half-assed internet sleuthing. Which two films does Mackie hate so much that he refuses to invoke their names? He’s made some duds post-2019, it must be said, but the forward march of the space-time continuum would dictate that he can’t be talking about Desert Warrior, Captain America: Brave New World, The Woman in the Window, or Elevation. Bonus points if you even know what a couple of those movies are.
Looking back upon Mackie’s pre-2019 career, though, it gets a bit fuzzy. Sure, he made some middling pictures like Man on a Ledge, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and Runner Runner, but he’s talked about them in interviews multiple times and doesn’t seem to have any particular axe to grind. So, they’re out.
This brings us nicely to a safe bet for the first subject of Mackie’s ire, and ironically, it’s a movie he wasn’t even in. Allow me to explain. In 2007, Mackie shot a movie entitled Bolden, a biopic of Buddy Bolden, the man who supposedly invented jazz music, but left no surviving recordings after he was committed to an insane asylum in 1907.
That’s pretty heavy subject matter, and probably wasn’t an easy shoot, so Mackie was miffed when director Daniel Pritzker wanted him back for extensive reshoots. Pritzker was an heir to one of the richest families in America, but he was a hugely inexperienced writer/director, and when the reshoots ran long, it nearly cost Mackie his role in the future Oscar winner The Hurt Locker.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Ultimately, Mackie managed to finish the movie in time, but Pritzker wound up reshooting half of it with a new actor playing Bolden. It didn’t even see the light of day until 2019, by which point Mackie was fit to be tied. Still, in 2025, he let bygones be bygones when he appeared on the Pivot podcast. Just kidding; he blasted Pritzker mercilessly, ranting, “The movie was trash, the director was trash, and he never directed again because he was trash.” Ergo, it’s safe to say Bolden is one half of Mackie’s offensive twosome.
As for the second film in the firing line, that one is harder to define with certainty. That’s never stopped me before, though, so it’s time for some wild speculation. In the aforementioned Deadline interview, Mackie explained that he chooses his roles carefully because he’s very aware of Black American representation in Hollywood.
“I am hyper aware of the roles I select and the way they’re portrayed.”
Anthony Mackie
He explained, “Even with movies like Eight Mile or The Hate U Give – where I played a wannabe bad boy, kick-ass drug dealer – they might not be the best of people character-wise, but I always talk to the director and the writer, and I ask them for a moment of humanity.”
Is it possible, therefore, that the other movie Mackie thinks is “fucking awful” is one where he inadvertently fell into the trap of portraying Blackness stereotypically or simplistically? From that perspective, his part in 2005’s The Man, a lame buddy comedy starring Samuel L Jackson and Eugene Levy, should be put on the chopping block.
In this laugh-allergic “comedy”, Mackie portrayed the questionably named Hector ‘Booty’ Babcock, a criminal informant who is murdered off-screen and ends up stuffed in the boot of a car. That doesn’t exactly sound like a nuanced role elucidating the humanity within ‘Booty’, so it’s got to be the second film Mackie will never talk about. Or I’m way off base, and my investigative skills leave a lot to be desired.
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