Carl Lumbly had to really had to “try to understand” his Captain America: Brave New World character.
The 73-year-old actor stars as Isaiah Bradley in the new Marvel film and found the “anchor” in his alter-ego in the “experience” of minorities.
He told Collider: “One of the biggest challenges, or the task I set for myself, was to try and understand someone just coming out into the world as we know it now, whose last real experience of the world was the early 1940s. In his youth, just before he went off, he married and had a wife who was pregnant.
“He left her, and then he went into a world that was unrecognizable. First the world war, the world of the military, and then imprisonment. So, when we discovered him in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” this is a man who has found the tiniest corner in the world he can find, and he’s just trying to stay right there, to stay out of the way. Every time he’s lifted his head, something has knocked him down.
“My anchor for Isaiah is the experience of so many people — Black people, dispossessed people, immigrants — in this country who have had that experience of having their expectations dashed about the application of the principles of equality in this nation, in this republic, but are still in love with the principles, and moving forward with that in mind.”
Lumbly found inner braveness
The Hollywood star noted that we “have to be brave in this new world” because it is “wild” but thinks that his character still has his “heart intact” at the start of the action.
He said: “When the juice is the sweetest, that’s the time to move, and he was on the move. He was there. Now, with what happens, he’s cautious about this new world, and you have to be brave in this new world because this new world is wild. But the one thing you can cling to is he has a sense of love, a love for Faith, his late wife, and love for Sam Wilson and those like him who might not have the same experience that he has, so they don’t have the same fears. They say fear is the mind-killer. So, we find Isaiah, I think, a little smarter when this begins, and despite what takes place, he leaves, and that little piece of his heart is still intact.”
