Anthony Mackie on Twisted Metal: "The Marvel thing is completely different"

radiotimes.com:

«I grew up with an Atari,» Marvel star Anthony Mackie tells RadioTimes.com over Zoom while promoting his latest project, the video game adaptation Twisted Metal.

«So we would play Asteroids, we would play Centipede, we would play Galaxy. But then, when all my other friends got ColecoVision, I got a Nintendo.

»So I loved Donkey Kong and Mario, and Duck Hunt — those were, like, my big games. And then, because it was before the internet, the cheat codes got out for Mario, so you were able to end the game. So it was my goal every night before bed to end Mario, and then I could go to sleep."

Mackie speaks with infectious enthusiasm about Twisted Metal, the new TV series launching today on Paramount Plus in the UK, and he also gets candid about his journey with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And he shares his thoughts on the rise of video game adaptations.

Listen to Anthony Mackie on the One More Life podcast

Mackie admits that he isn’t exactly super-skilled when it comes to controlling the car combat of Twisted Metal, the brightly-coloured and action-packed game which first launched in 1995 for the original PlayStation. (It is still available on PS Plus if you want to give it a try on PS5 or PS4.)

Mackie recalls: «You know, I was not good at the game. I tried to play the game again — still suck at it. It used to frustrate the hell out of me.

»But I found the characters to be so interesting, just all the different descriptions. And, you know, which car was a better car, and the guns on the cars and all that stuff. But I was never good at it."

Flash forward to more recent times, and the idea to adapt Twisted Metal into a post-apocalyptic TV comedy crosses Mackie’s desk.

He remembers: «Once I read it, I was really excited by the idea, because there's no story to the video game. You know, it's just like, 'Shoot each other!' But with this, I was really excited by the idea of creating the backstory and the characters and really making them three-dimensional and giving them a