‘Falcon and Winter Soldier’: 6 behind the Scenes Secrets from ‘Marvel Studios Assembled’

When are we all just gonna admit that all of Marvel Television’s output—including Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Netflix shows—are not part of the official MCU? It’s time, y’all. Those shows were produced by a company that no longer exists (Marvel Television) and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. plucked itself out of MCU continuity when it totally ignored the Blip! And now in this behind-the-scenes special, we have Marvel Studios higher-up and TFATWS executive producer Nate Moore coming close to saying what we all know to be true.

“When Disney+ was announced, we realized there was an opportunity to interweave a cinematic universe with the television universe, which had never been done before,” said Moore, contradicting all the talking points around Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Netflix shows from a few years back. Moore adds that these characters can now be explored in-depth on TV and then jump back into feature films seamlessly, “so that it’s truly connected for the first time.” Remember how #ItsAllConnected was the catchphrase Marvel Television tried to make happen for years? That is some shade, right there!

And that’s fine! Remember: the Marvel Television shows were never as connected to the movies as Jeph Loeb always insisted they were. They weren’t even connected to each other across networks (aside from one crossover between Runaways and Cloak & Dagger). This does not mean that any of these shows are bad or that they don’t matter or that you should stop loving them; it just means that shows like Daredevil and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. stand on their own, or lean against just a couple other TV shows, and that is fine.

After years of seeing Sam Wilson on the big screen, we finally got to see what his life was like before he became the high-flying Falcon. We met his sister, Sarah (Adepero Oduye), and learned all about his family’s Louisiana roots. However, that’s not so much Sam Wilson’s backstory as it is Anthony Mackie’s.

“Anthony’s backstory is rooted in Louisiana, and we merged some of that so that it could become really, really personal,” explained head writer Malcolm Spellman. This is a departure from the comics, where Sam Wilson was raised in Harlem and had a reputation as the kid with the pigeon coop. And then, uh, his origin became a tangled mess of Cosmic Cube reality/personality warping and Red Skull meddling and it’s really hard to figure out what is and is not part of Marvel Comics’ Sam Wilson’s origin. So… let’s just say that giving Sam a bit of Anthony’s history is a good thing.

Marvel fans love the Dora Milaje, and we all freaked out when a trio of Wakanda’s warriors showed up in Falcon and Winter Soldier to collect Zemo. It turns out that the Dora Milaje love being the Dora Milaje as much as we love seeing them in action. Florence Kasumba, who returned as Ayo in Falcon and Winter Soldier and given considerably more screen time than ever before, revealed that she’s always ready to answer the call.

“Any time I get to play Ayo, it’s always like a Christmas present,” said Kasumba, who previously played the character in Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, and Avengers: Infinity War. Kasumba said that Marvel routinely calls her up with zero details other than that she will be playing Ayo once again. “I just got used to the fact that when I get the phone call, I will always be ready to function because I train the whole year through and am in contact with the other women who played the Dora Milaje. And we exchange, and everybody still continues doing other projects, but at the end of the day, the minute you put on the armor and the costume, you become the character and that just feels like home.”

Y’all—the Dora Milaje keep in touch and they stay ready because of course they stay ready. The Dora Milaje group text has to be the most epic group text of all time.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s cast and crew were really pushed to the limit in order to get this series done. Originally, the series was set to film all of the sequences set in Latvia—the entirety of episode 4 and chunks of episodes 3 and 5—in Puerto Rico. Whether or not the show could safely film there was called into question after a massive earthquake hit the country. After Disney determined that it would be safe to film there, another quake hit right before the crew was set to travel. The entire production scrambled and relocated to Prague. Filming started and, a week later, the COVID-19 situation went from bad to “get out of the country right now or else you will be stuck in Prague indefinitely.”

Literally overnight, the producers rallied to book flights flights for roughly 100 cast and crew people, ensuring that they would be out of the country by 9 a.m. the following morning. Returning to Prague proved to be easier said than done, as the team had to ensure the local government that they could film in the country safely (let’s just say that Prague responded to the pandemic better than the US). After a seven month break, filming resumed in Prague in October 2020.

For the crime island of Madripoor, production designer Ray Chan spent months searching for the perfect filming location only to find it in their backyard. Series director Kari Skogland said that the idea to film this hive of scum and villainy just down the road came to them while they were literally standing at the cross streets in the back alleys of a small town outside of Atlanta. The alleys gave Chan the claustrophobic atmosphere he wanted, and he outfitted the locale with influences from Vietnam and Mozambique to create Madripoor. So… how long until those back alleys become a Marvel tourist trap?

Sharon Carter’s disappearance from the MCU following her treason-ish shield-stealing in Captain America: Civil War was not originally part of the character’s storyarc.

As EP Nate Moore explained, “Bringing back Sharon Carter was something that we explored even in Avengers 3 and 4. And the truth was there were so many characters in those films, you couldn’t really do her character justice,” especially considering that Civil War had left her on the run.

It turns out that keeping Sharon off the grid and out of the picture in Infinity War and Endgame gave the team the wiggle room to do something truly unexpected with the character by reintroducing her in TFATWS as the morally gray Power Broker.

Stream Marvel Studios Assembled: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+