One Avengers Star Secretly Joined Instagram and Nobody Noticed

Users on Instagram went wild for the debut of actress Jennifer Aniston on the social media site last week, as she shared a reunion selfie of the entire Friends cast for her first post. With some help from Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer, Aniston’s photo went immediately viral and has liked by more than 14 million people. In just six days since launching her account, Aniston has gained more than 15 million followers. This trend of celebrities launching social media accounts and instantly becoming Internet sensations has been a fairly common one over the last couple of years, but one of the prominent stars of the Marvel Cinematic Universe flew under the radar when joining Instagram a few days ago.

Anthony Mackie, best known for playing Sam Wilson, aka Falcon, in the Captain America and Avengers films, shared his first post to Instagram about five days ago. It may not have been a photo of his former Avengers co-stars, but it still earned 16 thousand likes, helping to propel Mackie’s new account to just over 28,000 followers in less than a week.

The first post simply featured a few different pairs of dress shoes lined up in a row. Mackie posted the photo with the question, “Which do you choose?”

In the final moments of Avengers: Endgame, when audiences last saw Mackie’s Sam Wilson, he was handed the iconic Captain America shield by Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers. That said, it may be a while before we see the character actually use the shield on screen, as his next appearance comes in the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Mackie and Sebastian Stan will be reprising their roles for the upcoming series, but Mackie hopes that Evans will be able to appear as Steve Rogers in some capacity.

“You get to sleep. You get a lot of downtime,” Mackie told IMDb about working on the new series without Evans. “No, there is no good part about it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it a thousand times, Chris is one of my closest friends. And when the three of us get together, it’s hell and anarchy. So hopefully we’ll have him around to cause some trouble on set.”

The Falcon and the Winter Solider is set to debut on Disney+ in 2020.