Anthony Mackie on Fishing, Drinking, and His Love of New Orleans

It was a bland piece of fish that sent Anthony Mackie running back to New Orleans after 11 years of living in New York City. “All the restaurants in New York were starting to serve tilapia,” says the actor, who reprises his role as Falcon in Captain America: Civil War, opening Friday. “It’s disgusting!” The next time he went home to visit his family, he and a friend caught and cooked some redfish. It took just one taste to remember what he’d left behind. “I called the moving company and said, ‘I’m mailing you the keys. Pack up my stuff, and send it down.’ ”

Mackie grew up in the suburban neighborhood of Gentilly, acutely aware of the thin line between the city and the outdoors in South Louisiana. As a kid, he liked to ride his bike up to fish along Bayou St. John, which runs through New Orleans’s Mid-City neighborhood, or head to City Park, a sprawling green space crisscrossed by teeming canals and waterways. “All those little lagoons are full of fish,” he says over coffee at Le Richelieu, a handsome, old-school hotel in the quieter end of the French Quarter. “There are storks. There’s alligators. There’s snakes. It’s a living, breathing ecosystem.”