EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Mackie, who plays Sam Wilson aka Captan America in the big-screen Marvel movies, will return to Broadway to take on William Shakespeare’s most notorious villain, Macbeth. He will take on the role from spring 2027 after an absence from the boards of 16 years, the actor reveals to Deadline.
Mackie will play Shakespeare’s tragic Scottish general, the Thane of Cawdor, in the New York transfer of a production that Tony and Olivier Award-nominated director Max Webster (Henry V) staged to great acclaim in London at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre in late 2023, with David Tennant and Cush Jumbo as the cruel Macbeths. The production later moved to the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End for a sold-out 11 week season.
“I started as a theater kid,” Mackie remarks. “And doing theater was my passion since I was seven years old. And you know, now being able to do it at this level in this space, not too many people can say they did Macbeth on Broadway,” he boasts.
Rehearsals for Macbeth start in February 2027, with previews running from late March or early April. The play runs until July at a Broadway theater yet to be announced.
But Mackie will still have outstanding Marvel Cinematic Universe duties to complete as soon as he ends with the “double, double toil and trouble” in Macbeth. “So once I finish on Broadway, I’ll go to finish up all the Avengers stuff for Secret Wars,” he adds referring to the next movie releasing late next year.
It’s Juilliard-trained Mackie’s first stab at playing the once loyal and brave general to King Duncan, who, paranoid with ambition, seeks to usurp the monarch with his bloodthirsty wife. “Macbeth becomes so paranoid he’s ’s willing to do anything to remain in power,” Mackie explains.
“That’s why I was so excited. I mean, you know, Macbeth is one of the great plays in the canon… It’s one of those roles that everybody dreams of playing. And coming from where I came from and being able to do it on Broadway is kind of a monumental feat, not only in my career, but in my life,” Mackie marvels.
Webster’s version of Macbeth won plaudits for its staging and revolutionary use of sound. Tony and Olivier Award-winning audio designer Gareth Fry (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) created a binaural sound system that involved the audience wearing headphones with the actors speaking their lines into microphones. “It’ll be something,” Mackie says. ”The microphones and the sound aspect of it is interesting because you in the audience can hear everything, you can hear every whisper, you can feel every emotion. So instead of having to project to the back of the house, the house comes to the stage.”
Juilliard-trained Mackie was last on Broadway 16 years ago in Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane alongside Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell and Zoe Kazan, directed by John Crowley.
The first of Mackie’s four sons was born 15 years ago and that’s when he realized that family and films would be his dual passions. Plus, living in New Orleans meant that treading the boards in NYC would be out, until now. “The thing about theater is if you live in New York, it’s great because it puts you at home. But if you don’t live in New York, you know, having kids, it’s a huge sacrifice to be able to take time from your kids and daddy duty to go and dip your foot back in the water to chase your dreams. But this was something I think my kids will understand,” Mackie says speaking via Zoom from his New Orleans home.
When Mackie was shooting Avengers: Doomsday in London he met up with his friend and mentor Wendall Pierce (Elsbeth) and when they got talking about theater work “it gave me the itch to get back on stage,” he says. Mackie is also planning to debut on the London stage “hopefully sooner or later,” he adds.
In his time away from filming Avengers: Doomsday he’d skip off to see London shows on weekends. ”I saw everything,” he chuckles.
“Everybody laughed at me because I was like, ‘You should go see Oliver! in London’… So for three days on set, I enjoyed it so much. I was just like doing a bad British accent, reciting lines from Oliver,” he jokes.
More recently, Mackie shot Season 3 of Peacock and Sony Pictures Television’s Twisted Metal, which the actor stars in and also executive produces with longtime manager Jason Spires of Inspire Management. Mackie will appear with Jamie Dornan in heist drama 12 12 12, debuting November 13, on Apple TV.
For now, however, the tragedy of Macbeth is uppermost in his mind. The character is tragic, Mackie suggests, because “his ambition got the best of him. And I think in this day and age, it’s such a poignant time to play this character and tell this story because we’re living in the day and age of ambition.”
Unrelenting ambition is all around us, he insists. “If you look at the business sector, if you look at the tech sector, if you look at sports, if you look at any realm of popular development in this day and age, the idea of ambition is something that’s a kind of common thread through all of them. Just watching the news every day, and you know, walking down the street every day, you see how this generation and this time evolves.”
We agree that Webster’s breathtaking staging at the Donmar and the Harold Pinter made the play accessible to an audience that had shied away from seeing Shakespeare’s plays. And the beauty of the Bard is that his dramas can be swayed to suit modern sensibilities – without losing their original insight.
“And that’s why I think the staging is so important. That’s why, in that production in London, the performances were so important because it really made it legible and and easy to understand. It’s such a beautiful play,” he says as he quotes a verse from the drama.
“I’m just honored and jumping in wholeheartedly,” he adds, while noting that he’s been working on the text with celebrated drama teacher Richard Feldman, who taught him at Juilliard. “I was like, ‘Hey, man. I need your help. I’m calling in my one favour.’ I’ve known him for 30 years,” Mackie explains. “He’s going to be my point person, my lead.”
Mackie still has his voice book and other notes from when he was studying at Juilliard in the 1990s. “So I’m going back and doing my vocal exercises again. You know, getting in the gym, building my weight, building my air intake back up, and because it’s a monumental feat. I mean, being on the stage is a workout,” he tells us.
“Being Captain America, kicking, punching, and flying is one thing, but being on a stage, it is a rigorous beast. I mean, it’s not like when you’re in a movie, you have to recite all of your lines every night. You know, it’s muscle memory. It’s physical memory. It’s an ordeal, a pleasurable one,” he adds.
“Theater is one of the things where I can honestly say the work is so worth the reward that you receive at the end of every show,” he adds.
Webster and the production’s casting directors are looking for an actress to play Lady Macbeth and other key characters. “I think it’s going to be an all-American cast,” Mackie notes.
Mackie’s Sam Wilson/Falcon took the mantle of Captain America from Chris Evans’s Steve Rogers/Captain America at the end of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, and has played him in the Disney+ miniseries The Falcon and the Winter Soldier with Sebastian Stan, along with his first full feature as the action-hero in Captain America: Brave New World.
Recently I caught up with Avengers: Endgame Encore, a re-release of Avengers: Endgame with extra footage. “They’re just gearing you up for Doomsday,” Mackie says laughing heartily about Avengers: Doomsday which is to be released on December 18.
Evans makes an appearance with Mackie in Avengers: Doomsday. He explains it all for us. “He’s just coming back and reprising his role, but I’m still Captain America. Like, if you look at the comic books, there are comic books where Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson are together fighting as Captain America. They’re both still Captain America. It’s just Steve Rogers comes back because they have a a big opponent to battle in Doomsday,” he clarifies.
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