Coming off of his breakout performance in The Hurt Locker, Anthony Mackie was cast to play Cap's new right-hand man in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, kicking off a fun bromance triangle with Sebastian Stan's Bucky later on.

But at a 2015 Emerald City Comic-Con event, he revealed he actually reached out to Marvel with a different character in mind.

"I was initially writing them because I wanted to be Black Panther," Mackie said on stage. Of course, they eventually got back to him—but about Falcon, a role Mackie was more than "happy" to take on.

"To go to work with those people every day, I'm very content and happy to be Falcon, next to Captain America," he said. "It's great to be in a great movie with a great group of people rather than let your ego say, 'I have to be the guy.'"

Captain America: The Winter Soldier co-director Anthony Russo told Collider of casting Mackie, "Yeah, we fell in love with Anthony Mackie for this character because he has an energy and a sense of fun and...Cap's coming from a very difficult place in this movie. He's basically a guy who wakes up in the modern world, we're maybe a year or two after he's come out of the state and his whole world is gone, this guy has lost everybody. It's a very severe sort of emotional and psychological place to be in, and Anthony Mackie just has this sort of wonderful energy that we just thought, if you're going to form a new friendship, he needed somebody like that to pull him."

After Cap have him the shield in Endgame, Mackie flew off to co-star with Stan in their own Disney+ series, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which ended with Sam assuming the mantle of Captain America.