Why Captain America Won’t Easily Return The Shield – Deadline

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details about Episode 2 of Disney + ‘s Falcon and Winter Soldier.

After learning more about US agent John Walker last Friday The falcon and the winter soldier, we saw that he was a kind-hearted All-American hero, who had similar doubts about filling Captain America’s boots, just as Sam Wilson weighed him. In this first scene with his girlfriend in her old high school locker room, Walker contemplates a “Why me?” attitude of picking up the shield. He knows it’s heavy, but at the end of the day, he knows he has a job to do.

Such a softy should be easy for Wilson to knock down, especially when it comes to getting the shield.

Not so fast, according to Wyatt Russell who plays Walker.

We asked Russell how easy it would be for Walker to let go of the shield, to which he responded, maintaining the suspense, “How do you know he’s giving up the shield?”

With Walker’s full arrival in the series, studied Marvel fans have a lot of guesswork about the former high school football champion and counterterrorism pro. And some of those assumptions are confirmed by the shadow Bucky and Sam throw at Walker. As the duo expressed at the end of last Friday’s show, Walker is a guy who abides by government rules and protocols. Falcon and Winter Soldier don’t do that. Therefore, there is no reason for the series title superheroes to team up with Walker and Battlestar.

Read about Walker, and you’ll learn more about heavy stuff. He would be Christian right according to Marvel tradition. Walker idolized his older brother Mike, who was a US Army helicopter pilot. Mike had PTSD, nearly burned the house down one night while drunk, and ultimately committed suicide. Apparently, Walker’s motivation in life came from trying to honor his late brother.

Dive deeper into Walker and you start to assume that future scenarios interconnect Falcon and the Winter Soldier with WandaVision and even Loki. Specifically, Walker was a friend of Scarlet Witch with the two members of the Force Works superhero team. At one point, she even fools him, but it’s really Loki posing as her. At one point down the road, Walker, as a member of the Doctor Doom’s Avengers team, even fights an evil version of Scarlet Witch.

However, according to Russell, throw away what you know about John Walker.

The actor says about preparing for the role: “As soon as you open Wikipedia, you are more confused. There are so many iterations about where he is and where he’s going, and who he’s with, it’s too confusing. I watched a lot of artwork from the comics and it informed me more about who the character will be, the essence of the character in the artwork and in their body language. I looked at a lot of pictures, but I didn’t read any comics, there are too many different scenarios. “

“Which the MCU does very well – they don’t literally take everything from the comics and put them into characters,” Russell says, “Sometimes they do a better job at making them more complex.”

And the complex is definitely what Walker is. At the end of the first episode, when he appears, he’s the jaw-dropping square jawbone of a Dick tracy scoundrel. But by Episode 2, really, who wouldn’t love John Walker? He easily comes to the aid of Bucky and Sam in a top-of-two 18-wheeler fight in Munich against the Flagsmashers. He gets Bucky out of jail. But after Falcon and Winter Soldier refuse to work with Walker, the latter’s directive to them is “Stay out of my way.”

But the joy of playing the character of Russell lies in his unpredictability to audiences.

Says the actor, whose father Kurt plays Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy 2, ““There is a dichotomy for him, there is complexity in his mind, in terms of what his past was and what and how it affects his presence.

“Part of what attracted me to him was the ability to be able to play someone who, on the surface, you might think you know what he is or what he looks like, but as you dig a little deeper, you may find that they are doing things for reasons that were unknown to you before they were given to you. “