Anthony Mackie is speaking out about the segregation he’s felt while various Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) sets.

While speaking with Daveed Diggs for Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Mackie talked about how most MCU films save for Black Panther had majority white crew on set. Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, was the only set with a majority Black crew. Mackie, of course, is set to star in one of the MCU’s biggest television series, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. 

“It really bothered me that I’ve done seven Marvel movies where every producer, every director, every stun person, every costume designer, every PA, every single person has been white,” he said.

“We’ve had one Black producer; his name was Nate Moore. He produced Black Panther,” he said. “But then when you do Black Panther, you have a Black director, Black producer, a Black costume designer, a Black stunt choreographer. And I’m like, that’s more racist than anything else. But if you only can hire the Black people for the Black movie, are you saying they’re not good enough when you have a mostly white cast?”

Mackie said that as leading actors, he and Diggs can lobby for better representation behind the scenes.

“My big push with Marvel is to hire the best person for the job,” he said, adding that he’s “cool” with counting percentages of racial and gender representation on crews “for the next 10 years.”

“It starts to build a new generation of people who can put something on their resume to get them on other jobs,” he continued. “If we’ve got to divvy out as a percentage, divvy it out. And that’s something as leading men that we can go in and push for.”

Mackie can currently be seen in The Banker on Apple TV+.

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