Anthony Mackie

Anthony Dwane Mackie was born on September 23, 1978, in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Martha (née Gordon) and Willie Mackie Sr., a carpenter who owned a roofing business called Mackie Roofing. His brother, Calvin Mackie, served as an associate professor of engineering at Tulane University before moving on to work with the Louisiana Recovery Authority. Mackie attended Warren Easton Sr. High School and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts before completing a high school drama program at the North Carolina School of the Arts in 1997. He subsequently trained at Juilliard's Drama Division as part of Group 30, graduating in 2001 alongside actors Tracie Thoms and Lee Pace.

Mackie's early stage work established him as a serious theatrical talent. In 2002, he served as an understudy to Don Cheadle in Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog and won an Obie Award for his performance in Carl Hancock Rux's play Talk. While still at Juilliard in 2001, he portrayed Tupac Shakur in the play Up Against the Wind. His Broadway career spanned from 2003 to 2010, during which he appeared in The 24 Hour Plays 2003, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, The 24 Hour Plays 2004, and starred in Drowning Crow. He also participated multiple times in the annual 24-Hour Plays held in New York City each fall. In 2009, he played Pentheus in the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park production of The Bacchae, and in February 2010 he starred alongside Christopher Walken in A Behanding in Spokane on Broadway. In March 2008, Mackie appeared in three August Wilson plays — Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, and Jitney — at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., as part of a month-long presentation of Wilson's Century Cycle. His Off-Broadway credits include A Soldier's Play and Talk.

Mackie made his film debut in 2002's 8 Mile, playing the antagonist Papa Doc. His first starring film role came in the 2003 independent production Brother to Brother, in which he played Perry, a young gay Black artist, earning him an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Actor. In 2004, he appeared in Million Dollar Baby, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and starred in Spike Lee's She Hate Me. He went on to appear in Half Nelson, Crossover, and We Are Marshall in 2006. His performance in The Hurt Locker (2008) brought him nominations for Best Supporting Actor at both the AAFCA Awards and the Independent Spirit Awards. That same year, he portrayed Tupac Shakur in the biographical film Notorious. In 2011, he appeared in The Adjustment Bureau as Harry Mitchell.

Mackie became widely recognized for his role as Sam Wilson in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 2014. He reprised the role across numerous MCU films, including Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame, before starring as the titular character in Captain America: Brave New World in 2025. He is set to continue in the role in Avengers: Doomsday (2026) and Avengers: Secret Wars (2027).

On television, Mackie portrayed Martin Luther King Jr. in the 2016 HBO film All the Way and took on the lead role of Takeshi Kovacs in the second season of Netflix's Altered Carbon in 2020. He starred as a delivery driver in the Peacock series Twisted Metal beginning in 2023, and appeared as a fictionalized version of himself in the Apple TV+ series The Studio in 2025, a role that earned him his first Primetime Emmy nomination. Mackie also starred in and produced the Netflix science fiction film Outside the Wire, released in January 2021.

Outside of acting, Mackie opened a bar called NoBar in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn in the summer of 2011, with plans for a second location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2013; all NoBar locations closed in 2015. He married childhood sweetheart Sheletta Chapital in 2014, and the two divorced in 2018. They have four sons together, and the family resides in New Orleans.