Carl Lumbly Never Misses

There are three small words that have kept Carl Lumbly going all these years.

Every Wednesday, he’d call home to speak with his mother, who’d never finish a conversation without this goodbye: “Keep sweet, Carly.” 

The Minneapolis-born son of Jamaican immigrants never expected to pursue a career in acting. Instead, it found him. Working as a freelance reporter in his hometown after graduating from Macalester College, Lumbly stopped by a local sketch comedy theater while on the hunt for a story. In a twist of fate, he was asked to audition instead, setting him on a path that would take him far from his family and launch a 40-year career that few people and certainly he never dreamed of. 

“I’ve held a standard of trying to be personally decent and trying to help where I can,” Lumbly said. “I love working with people, and being collegial is one of the great joys of doing this work.” 

“I’m myself, for better or worse. I’m still who I was when I got here,” he added. “I still believe in love. I still feel that energy put toward helping is energy that gives back to you and spreads light. That’s very, very important to me. There’s something about wanting to be a positive contributor to my community that has not changed.”

This off-screen set of ethics has fueled a staying power in an industry where longevity isn’t the norm and kindness is rarely rewarded. Lumbly has just kept quietly doing the work anyway — turning in performances in series like “Alias” and “Cagney and Lacey,” as well as the recent “The Shining” sequel “Doctor Sleep,” that are brimming with the same sensitivity and compassion that took root in him at a young age.

Now, at 69 years old, the actor is finally getting his flowers for his powerhouse turn as Marvel ’s forgotten super-soldier, Isaiah Bradley, aka the original Black Captain America, on “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” But, however overdue this moment is for Lumbly, it’s also a bittersweet measure of how times have changed. Nearly 30 years ago, the actor played the first Black superhero on prime-time television in “M.A.N.T.I.S.,” a one-season wonder that was effectively whitewashed after a groundbreaking pilot.

It’s certainly rare for an actor to play a superhero let alone a Black one once in a career, but for Lumbly a second chance was an opportunity to get it right.

The first time Lumbly saw himself on screen, he was convinced people who met him in real life would be surprised that he wasn’t actually green. Not because he was playing some extraterrestrial being or dabbling in small-screen sci-fi he’d get that chance voicing the Martian Manhunter in the animated “Justice League” series and later portraying the character’s father on “Supergirl”  but because the makeup artists on set didn’t know what to do with him.

In this case, he was playing a character who was decidedly human, since he was still getting his start in the entertainment industry through guest stints in hit ’80s shows like “Taxi,” “Emergency!” and “L.A. Law.”

“Green or a tawny nutmeg,” Lumbly recalled of his appearance on screen at the start of his career. “Something that was not exactly how I looked as I moved around in the world.”

“My earliest experiences walking into a makeup trailer on a film or a television set involved adjusting to the fact that my presence was unusual or that whatever makeup was on hand that perhaps had been used for another actor of my complexion would be what I would be using,” he said. “I would be told, ‘It’s certainly close to you, but not as dark as you are, so that will help us,’ as a way to help me understand that this was a good thing.”

Back in those days, he was made acutely aware of what it meant to be a Black man being broadcast into people’s homes. He remembers higher-ups telling him: “We can’t have you in the scene because they wouldn’t like it in the South. The sponsors would be uncomfortable if your character said this. Your character is standing too close to her.”

“What I have experienced in my career as regards to certain ideas about Black men has been very limited and rarely been nuanced in the way I live my life as a Black man,” Lumbly said. 

“M.A.N.T.I.S.” should’ve been the game-changer Lumbly was looking for. The series earned the distinction of being the first to feature a Black superhero as the main character. The series, which premiered in 1994 as a TV movie pilot two years after the Rodney King police beating trial, starred Lumbly as Dr. Miles Hawkins, a genius inventor who is paralyzed from the waist down after being shot by a police officer during the Los Angeles uprising. Enter a high-tech exo-suit that not only allows him to walk again but gives him crime-fighting powers.

The pilot of the show — which was co-created by Sam Hamm and Sam Raimi, who’d later go on to launch the original “Spider-Man” film trilogy — tackled topics like police brutality and corrupt politicians head-on, laying an early groundwork for how superhero storytelling would later be used to address social injustice.

“It was ahead of its time,” Lumbly said of the episode. “I think it was, in and of itself, heroic as a concept. I felt such pride in being a part of it.”

Despite bringing in massive ratings for Fox, “M.A.N.T.I.S.” was completely overhauled when it debuted as a series. The elements of the pilot that had felt revolutionary to viewers were the first to go, with network executives at the time calling the show “too grim and too realistic.” All four Black supporting characters, including Lumbly’s future “Alias” co-star Gina Torres, were axed from the series. They were replaced by three new actors, two of whom were white.

“The remaining bit of diversity was me,” Lumbly said. “The dismantling of it was justified, to my view, in a very flimsy way, ... The killer for me was the response of some of the producers that the suggestion that racism might have anything to do with it was absolutely ridiculous. That was the end of the story.”

Ratings for the series tanked, with fans feeling betrayed over its retooling, and Fox pulled the plug after one season. Torres said the show stands as a “huge lesson for me on how many different ways the entertainment industry was and is so unapologetically biased against POC.”

“My memory of Carl at this time was one of serenity and professionalism. I never witnessed a crack,” she told HuffPost. “It was a beautiful example of how the work and the importance of what we were doing had to be what drove us forward. First Black superhero on TV. That was big.”

Lumbly was the bright spot in her experience, and the two stayed close long after the series was shelved. “I never let him go. Who in their right mind would?” Torres said. “Carl’s eyes make me a little weak. All I ever had to do was look in them and know exactly where we were and what we were doing and we’re going to get to the other side of this together.”

It would take Lumbly six years to land another series regular gig on a show that stuck around. This time, however, it was about a different kind of superhero: the spy next door with an astronomical wig budget. Out of his more than 100 credits, “Alias” stands out as “one of the very best” in Lumbly’s memory  just don’t ask him to describe any of the show’s wild, bordering-on-nonsensical plot twists (“Rambaldi? Psh, come on”). For five years on the ABC series, Lumbly played agent Marcus Dixon, the steadfast partner of series star Jennifer Garner. When asked to comment on this story, she immediately requested to jump on the phone. 

Holding back tears as she described how foundational her relationship with Lumbly has been in her own life, Garner explained that she has “never been able to talk about him without crying.”

“He was my total partner,” Garner said. “It was Carl and I together in the middle of the night, doing these crazy things, speaking languages and just doing things that were so physically hard together.”

Garner recalled a moment in the early days of “Alias” when she confided in Lumbly about how she was struggling to work out before filming due to the demands of the production schedule. Lumbly, in turn, suggested that she squeeze in a run at 3 a.m. instead. 

“I just kind of laughed and said, ‘Who would do that?’” Garner said, to which Lumbly responded, “I do. I would never come to work without being warmed up and being ready.”

“That was in the first season, and it changed everything for me,” she said. “I’ve always just done what it’s taken ever since then because I respect him so much.”

“M.A.N.T.I.S.” was all but a brief, nearly forgotten footnote in the history of superheroes on-screen when “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” came Lumbly’s way. 

As a comic book neophyte, the actor had to rely on his son to explain the importance of Isaiah Bradley. The character — a Black super-soldier who was experimented on, imprisoned by his own government and erased from history, echoing the infamous Tuskegee experiments — is one of the most pivotal in Marvel lore for laying bare America’s racist legacy.

Lumbly handily steals the entire series by communicating a whole life of pain in a few mighty scenes. Fans are already deeming his performance Emmy-worthy, and they aren’t the only ones taking notice. 

“I have been waiting for Carl Lumbly to have his day,” Garner said about the outpouring of praise surrounding her former co-star. “He’s always been just so majestic and such a powerful person that he can really hold somebody larger than life. The fact that he is having this moment is completely and entirely appropriate. It’s like he’s finally aged enough to be as regal as he should be.”

Placing the defanging of “M.A.N.T.I.S.” in stark relief, the Disney+ series commits to exploring Bradley’s story through an uncompromising lens, deriving much of its power from how it reflects the realities of racial injustice off screen. 

“The character of Isaiah Bradley for my taste is so well-formed that I don’t feel like I have to go through gyrations to have him make sense to me,” Lumbly said, describing his scenes as “very satisfying” to shoot. “He’s a man that I recognize in many ways and a man I was proud to portray.”

In perhaps the defining scene of the series, Lumbly’s character sits down with Anthony Mackie’s Falcon, telling him that “no self-respecting Black man would ever want to be Captain America.”

For Lumbly, the key piece of dialogue speaks not only to his character’s internal struggles, but also the complexities of Black patriotism in our current age. 

“Every self-respecting Black man in this country who believes in these ideals operates like a Captain America,” he said. “It’s an act of bravery and courage to walk out in the face of unfairness, in the face of bigotry and prejudice, in the face of violence and proclaim that your presence is vital as a citizen.”

The Marvel series arrived at an inflection point in the country’s history, with the finale airing days before Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all counts in the murder of George Floyd, a man who hailed from Lumbly’s hometown.

“My experiences there, unfortunately, led me to not be particularly surprised by the action of the police,” he said. “The unfortunate reality is that [Floyd’s murder] was captured in a very different age. I have no idea how many moldering bones lie in some back alley or some field or at the base of a river or scrunched up in some car that represents an action taken by police that was unlawful where someone allowed their darker angels to overcome them because in part they had a position that would allow them to do it.”

Lumbly has witnessed enough history to know that progress isn’t linear and that the fight continues. Still, he’s heartened by the care with which his character was crafted and how people of “all colors, persuasions, backgrounds are beginning to acknowledge that we all have skin in the game, pun intended.”

“This industry of ours has not led the pack,” he said. “In many ways, it’s run along the way the country has run, which fortunately means that now that we’re in a time of advocacy and beginning to examine the ways in which more voices need to be included.”

As for his own future plans, Lumbly seems delighted to keep popping up in projects just long enough for his presence to be a welcome one. 

“I didn’t expect the reaction to be as large,” he added with a laugh about the love he has received in recent weeks. “But I’m also not surprised by a lot, so I’m glad that I was off on that.”