Captain America: Brave New World Has ‘Complexity’, Says Star

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“Let’s say yes,” Carl Lumbly says with a smile when asked if there’s anything exciting we’re going to learn about his legacy character in Captain America: Brave New World.

Lumbly, who plays the MCU’s first black recipient of the super soldier serum, debuted in 2021 Disney+ series The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. He reprises his role in Captain America: Brave New World, but as the trailer shows, he looks anything but heroic, shooting at President Ross (Harrison Ford) during a White House attack.

Speaking to Newsweek, Lumbly says fans are about to unearth a lot of new information about his character, Isaiah Bradley.

“Do you accept these lightning strikes of information about a character that you thought you knew, as just being part of the way the world works?” Lumbly asks, teasing how at least a portion of the film will delve into more of his character’s fascinating backstory.

“We don’t have Steve Rogers anymore. The Steve Rogers world was a wonderful world, a world that needed fixing, but that world is beyond us now. And the world that we are just entering, there’s an opportunity here. If we’re brave.”

That world involves the new Captain America, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie). Unlike Isiah Bradley, he has no super soldier serum to boost his battlefield skills. What he does have, however, is a cutting edge suit capable of supersonic flight, as well as Cap’s impenetrable shield. And he’s got a fight on his hands against his enemies.

One of these enemies is Bradley, who makes a surprisingly violent turn after rightfully, eventually being recognised as a hero in Falcon and Winter Soldier. At the climax of the series, Wilson forms a friendship with Bradley, and even gets him his own statue in a museum to recognise pioneering war efforts the US government buried. In Captain America: Brave New World the former friends are now at odds.

The commonly held theory is Bradley shoots the president not by his own choice, but because he’s been brainwashed, reacting to programming the same way the Winter Soldier does in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. The previous film in the series may have come out almost a decade ago, but Lumbly feels fans are still on top of the layers of MCU lore.

“They are very knowledgeable,” Lumbly says of Marvel fans. “They seem to have information in their minds, and speculation that comes close to things that are happening. So I think there will be a lot for a fanbase that likes complexity and new elements, and also nuance of thought and action as well. I think this is the film for them.”

Captain America: Brave New World releases 14 February 2025.