“I just felt that it was a beautifully written, shared life experience, and I wanted to take a shot at it. And I took that shot. It was very affecting for me,” he says. “I felt very close to what he was saying, not my circumstances, not my experience, but certainly similar to many stories that I’ve heard about. Stories about people who have sacrificed, people who have been betrayed, and people who keep going.”
The truth of that story helps Lumbly stay true to the character, even through the spectacle that is the MCU. “It’s not my responsibility,” he says of the larger task of keeping up with Isaiah’s place in the ever-expanding shared universe. “I literally just lived with the character and the characters relationship to the other characters laid out in a Marvel universe, which is different from the universe that I thought was the universe.”
“I think my responsibility is to put myself fully in the world that has been laid out in the text and be as truthful inside it as possible. I felt that was my one edict, that Isaiah’s story was truth.” That’s a great word to use to describe Isaiah, who made his debut in the 2002 comic miniseries Truth: Red, White & Black, written by Robert Morales and illustrated by Kyle Baker. Drawing inspiration from the real-world Tuskegee Experiments, Truth connected the Captain America story to the country’s history of violence against Black people.
Troubling as it is, Lumbly sees hope in Isaiah’s story. “He’s simply talking about what happened, what he saw. And I think that is something that a lot of people can relate to.”
“It takes a lot to go through terrible things, talk about how terrible they were, and still be present to move forward beyond what was terrible into the dream that we all have the New Jerusalem, a place where everyone has recognition for the simple fact of being alive and human”
However, Lumbly admits that he didn’t initially see genre movies as the way to imagine that better world. “When Buckaroo Banzai came out in 1984, it seemed like a universe, but people weren’t sure it was a universe they wanted to be part of. It talks about things like eighth dimensions, electrodes, and accelerator machines. It just seemed so incredibly wild that there wasn’t initially an audience.”
