Netflix Releases Outside the Wire Trailer Starring Anthony Mackie as an Android Military Officer

It’s a big week for Anthony Mackie. First, Marvel Studios released the first look at his upcoming Disney+ series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Now Netflix has released the trailer for his upcoming sci-fi action movie Outside the Wire, in which he plays an android military officer. Per Netflix’s synopsis, “Set in the future, a drone pilot (Damson Idris) is sent into a deadly militarized zone where he finds himself working for an android officer (Anthony Mackie) tasked to locate a doomsday device before the insurgents do.” Mikael Håfström directs the movie, which debuts on the streaming service on January 15th.

Outside the Wire stars Anthony Mackie as “Leo”, Damson Idris as “Harp”, Enzo Cilenti as “Miller”, Emily Beecham as “Sofiya”, Michael Kelly as “Eckhart”, and Pilou Asbæk as “Victor Koval”. Rob Yescombe and Rowan Athale wrote the screenplay, based on a story by Yescombe. Mackie is also one of the film’s producers, alongside Ben Pugh, Erica Steinberg, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, and Jason Spire.

Håfström previewed the film in discussion with Polygon. “It’s this kind of close, future around the corner story, I’ve always liked,” Håfström said. “Certain aspects of the story were things that we hadn’t seen yet but that we could sort of imagine if we just took today’s technology and pushed it a little bit more forward 20, 30 years or so.”

The director also commented on how taken he was by Damson Idris’ audition. “There were a lot of good young actors reading for this part,” he said. “There were a few that I really liked but suddenly I had a Zoom meeting with this guy Damson, that I actually hadn’t really heard about before or knew anything about really. After like one minute, I just knew somehow this is Harp, this is him. The humor, the charisma, the way that he embraced the part, the way he thought about Harp the character, his backstory, where he came from. He’s a very thoughtful man, Damson. He’s very clever and has a great sense of humor which, to me, is very important, too.”

Idris commented on working with Mackie. “Mackie’s been working in the business for a long time and he’s great at what he does,” he said. “I’m a new young actor in the game, still learning, and he taught me so much about what it means to work on movies of this magnitude. About how amazing it is to connect with people from different corners of the world. To be on Netflix alongside Mackie is such an amazing thing, because I know it’s going to hit so many different living rooms.”

Outside the Wire debuts on Netflix on January 15th.