While he’s probably somewhat joking, there’s truth to what he says. Mackie’s fellow guest star in The Studio, famed actor/director Ron Howard, also landed a nomination. Mackie co-starred with Ryan Gosling in 2006’s Half Nelson, and Gosling got a Best Actor Oscar nomination. The same thing happened for Jeremy Renner in 2008’s The Hurt Locker. Mackie played Martin Luther King Jr. alongside Bryan Cranston, who played Lyndon B. Johnson, in the HBO film All the Way, and Cranston got an Emmy nomination.

Back in January, ahead of the release of Captain America: Brave New World, Mackie revealed in an interview with Fandango that he thought his character Sam Wilson was doomed to not survive the 2019 blockbuster Avengers: Endgame.

“We were shooting in Atlanta, it was a bunch of us at his house … we were sitting there watching a game, shooting the s**t … he goes, ‘Have you read the new script?’” Mackie recalled previous Captain America star Chris Evans saying to him.

“I said, ‘Nah.’ He’s like, ‘You haven’t read the [script] — you don’t know?’ I’m like, ‘Damn’ — and you know, being Black, I’m like, ‘I’mma die, damn!’” Mackie continued. Then he went on to share how Evans guided him to a “work room” where “all his Marvel stuff” was laid out.

“[Evans] gets the new script, he goes to, like, the last 10 pages, and he goes, ‘Read it!’” Mackie said.

After reading the scene where Rogers gives Wilson Captain America’s shield, Mackie still didn’t understand what was happening, leading Evans to spell it out for him: “Because you’re Captain America!”

“It was a great time, and I couldn’t imagine, like, finding out any other way,” Mackie said.