When the Avengers return to the big screen next year with the highly anticipated Avengers: Doomsday, the all-star team of Marvel superheroes will have a decidedly different look.
Gone is Chris Evans as Captain America – he's given his shield to his former partner Anthony Mackie, formerly the Falcon. Gone is Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow – her boots will be filled by Florence Pugh. Yes, Robert Downey Jr will be back, but not as Iron Man – he'll be taking the role as the villain, Doctor Doom.
And while Mackie is now the anchor of the MCU, beginning in proper with Captain America: Brave New World opening tomorrow across the Middle East, he won't be flying solo. His character, Sam Wilson, has a new partner, Joaquin Torres, played by American actor Danny Ramirez.
First appearing in the 2021 series Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ramirez has a central role as the new Falcon in Brave New World, a role that the actor, 32, takes on with the same anxious excitement as does his fictional counterpart, understanding the weight of responsibility that now falls on his shoulders.
"The biggest joy for me – and this is a rare thing when you consider how many movies and shows come out every year now – was knowing that this is a project that would be viewed by a ton of people," Ramirez tells The National.
"There are times that you go into work and put in the effort and nobody sees it. I got to work every day and reminded myself, everything we're doing we're going to share to the world, and that helped put me over the edge, especially in training. I'd be exhausted, and then I'd remember, and it would give me that extra burst. I turned the pressure into fuel."
While nothing can prepare you for becoming an Avenger, Ramirez has some practice in the spotlight, having starred opposite Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick. And he seems to have kept some of Cruise's gung ho energy.
"If you can get me to the UAE, you can drop me out of a plane. We can climb the tallest building in the world. I can do all of that too," he says, referencing some of Cruise's most famous UAE stunts from the Mission: Impossible franchise.
The most successful MCU castings have had a thin line between an actor's public persona and their characters. Downey Jr and Tony Stark have oft-commented upon personal similarities and backstories, for example, and the late Chadwick Boseman's stoic heroism mirrored that of his character in Black Panther.
And while he may not have seen himself in the source material for his character Joaquin Torres – "every third line he's just flirting with a different woman in the comics," Ramirez laughs – the version that he found in the scripts for Brave New World were startlingly similar to his own situation, he found.
"It was so much like the actual place I was in my life at the time. It was art imitating life – every day that I got to set, what was happening to me as a person was also what Joaquin was experiencing."
In the film, Torres is an US Air Force intelligence officer and an admirer of Sam Wilson, who is thrust into the role of the man he once idolised. That was the same for Ramirez, who dreamed that one day he would be able to work with Mackie, and now found himself as Falcon.
"I was working with my heroes. The parallels were so clear that I was like, 'let's not mess with this too much.' I let every day be a new discovery, and I went along for the ride. I allowed that emotional state to be the strength of it, because it was authentic. It was grounded in my own experience," says Ramirez.
Now that the film is nearly out, Ramirez is grappling with something else – not filling the suit himself, but watching children across the world model themselves after him. Now, he's the hero.
"I've already seen people do some cosplay, even though the movie hasn't come out. They're copying toys and building their own suits, which is mind boggling."
Captain America: Brave New World will be released on Thursday in cinemas across the Middle East
