Becoming Anthony Mackie
Actor Anthony Mackie is standing in a private room at the 40/40 Club, Jay-Z's swanky Manhattan sports bar, watching the Ohio State-Michigan football game. During a lull in the action, a trivia question is posed to the packed crowd: Name two Michigan quarterbacks currently playing in the NFL. The prize? A gray Michigan T-shirt.
Mackie's hand is the first one to shoot upward. When his name is called, the football die-hards packing the room turn their eyes to him.
"Brady," he says quickly. "And, uh, Grossman."
"Grossman!?" the room fires back. This is not Mackie's finest moment. (The correct answer was Tom Brady and Brian Griese.) Today, the 28-year-old will have to settle for some free appetizers and his status as a star of a new football movie, if not football trivia.
In "We Are Marshall," the just-released feature about the Marshall University football program mourning and mending itself after the 1970 plane crash that killed every team member and coach aboard, Mackie plays Nate Ruffin. One of four players not on that ill-fated flight, Ruffin became captain of the West Virginia school's patched-together squad the following year.
Classically trained at Juilliard, Mackie has a résumé that so far has been peppered with edgy supporting roles: a rapper in "8 Mile," a hot-tempered boxer in "Million Dollar Baby" and a drug dealer in Half Nelson.
Playing the shell-shocked Ruffin took on an entirely new meaning for the actor when, during the first week of shooting the movie in April, he received word that his own father had passed away.
Already no stranger to pain -- his mother died from cancer when he was 15, and his childhood home in New Orleans was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina -- Mackie chose not to comment about his father's death, other than to insist that he did not pull from any of his personal anguish. "When I'm doing a film, I don't deal with Anthony Mackie in day-to-day life, I deal with that character and his day-to-day results," he says.
MACKIE SAYS his father, Willie Mackie Sr., "told me as a kid, 'To be is to work. Anything you're going to do, you have to earn your stripes and work at it.'" Perhaps that helps to explain how Mackie was able to return to the Marshall set just a few days after his father's funeral.
"His situation was sort of a microcosm of the movie," says McG, the film's director. "The best way to respect his dad was to move forward and be the best actor he could be."
When away from acting, Mackie is not unlike your typical 20-something bachelor: He likes to fish, play golf and cook seafood. He's got a crush on someone but says that he remains hopelessly mystified by women. He has restored a 1965 Mustang and written what he considers to be a fairly awful screenplay about the dating scene. "I'm just a homebody," Mackie says.
And, as he continues to watch the big game at the 40/40 Club, Mackie is just another guest. At one point, he gestures to the huge flat-screen TV, on which plays a trailer for "We Are Marshall." With the commercial's sound turned off in favor of a hip-hop house mix, and with everyone else in the room distracted by conversations and plates filled with appetizers, no one but Mackie seems to notice. He appears in the ad for only a split second, but it is enough to put the slightest grin on his face.
So what is it like to see that on TV?
"Instant gratification," Mackie says. "Instant gratification."
© USA Weekend Magazine, Dec. 24, 2006
Photo By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
