Anthony Mackie

Early life

Mackie was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Martha (née Gordon) and Willie Mackie, Sr., a carpenter who owned a roofing business, Mackie Roofing. He attended Warren Easton Sr. High School and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) and graduated from the high school drama program at the North Carolina School of the Arts (NCSA) in 1997. He later graduated from the Juilliard School's Drama Division as a member of Group 30 (1997–2001), which also included actors Tracie Thoms and Lee Pace.

Career

In 2002, Mackie worked as an understudy to Don Cheadle in Suzan-Lori Parks' play Topdog/Underdog and won an OBIE Award for his role in Carl Hancock Rux's play Talk. His first starring role in a feature film was in the 2003 independent film Brother to Brother, where he played Perry, a young African-American artist who struggles to adjust to the world as a black homosexual. He appeared in the 2002 film 8 Mile, as Papa Doc, Eminem's nemesis. Mackie would later go on to star as a man who struggles to adjust to the world he's created after becoming a corporate whistleblower and later starting a business impregnating lesbians for a fee in Spike Lee's 2004 film She Hate Me.

Mackie appeared in 2004 Academy Award winner, Million Dollar Baby, and five years later appeared in another Academy Award winning film, The Hurt Locker (2009).

In 2006, Mackie starred in Half Nelson alongside Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps as well as We Are Marshall.

In March 2008, Mackie starred in three plays by playwright August Wilson at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, and Jitney – all part of "August Wilson's 20th Century", a month-long presentation of ten staged readings of Wilson's "Century Cycle".

Mackie has participated several times in the "24-Hour Plays" held in New York City each fall.

Mackie portrayed the rapper Tupac Shakur in the 2009 film Notorious. He first played Shakur on Off-Off Broadway (while still at Juilliard) in 2001 in the play Up Against the Wind, which also featured his classmate Thoms. Other films in the works include biopics of Olympian Jesse Owens, Antebellum slave revolt leader Nat Turner, and cornetist and jazz musician Buddy Bolden.

In the summer of 2009, he played the role of Pentheus in the New York City Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park production of The Bacchae.

He starred with Christopher Walken in A Behanding in Spokane on Broadway, which opened February 15, 2010. Mackie also narrated The Best That Never Was, director Jonathan Hock's documentary for the ESPN 30 for 30 series about the Philadelphia, MS native and football star Marcus Dupree. He appeared in the 2011 Matt Damon film The Adjustment Bureau where he plays Harry Mitchell, a sympathetic member of a shadowy supernatural group that controls human destiny. Mackie co-starred, as the Falcon, in the Marvel Studios sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014). He reprised the role in 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man, and again in 2016's Captain America: Civil War. On June 30, 2015, Anthony Mackie was cast as Martin Luther King Jr. in the HBO TV drama All the Way. Mackie appears opposite Bryan Cranston (six-time Emmy Award-winner for Breaking Bad, and 2015 Best Actor Academy Award-nominee for Trumbo). Cranston repeats his Tony Award-winning role as Lyndon B. Johnson from the play of the same name in this telefilm, which debuted on HBO on May 21, 2016.

Personal life

Mackie opened a bar called NoBar in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn in the summer of 2011. He had plans to open a second NoBar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2013, but closed all NoBar locations in 2015.

His brother, Calvin Mackie, PhD was formerly an Associate Professor of Engineering at Tulane University.

Mackie married his long-time girlfriend, Sheletta Chapital in 2015.