Although Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers was the only recipient of Dr. Abraham Erskine’s original Super Soldier Serum, as seen in Captain America: The First Avenger (the fifth of the Marvel movies in order), others were injected with variations of that serum in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Carl Lumbly’s Isaiah Bradley was one of those individuals, but he never crossed paths with Steve. I’ve wondered before how a scene between these two would have looked, and it turns out Lumbly has too, as he shared with me how he envisioned it going down.
I recently interviewed Lumbly for the Digital release of the 2025 movie Captain America: Brave New World,. In addition to him talking about how difficult his running scene was during the White House action sequence, I brought up that Bucky Barnes mentioned in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (streamable with a Disney+ subscription) that Steve Rogers never knew about Isaiah Bradley. So I was curious what Lumbly thought a conversation between Isaiah and Steve might have looked like, and he told me that he believed “they would recognize something about their shared fate.” As he explained:
What happened to Steve Rogers as the result of an experiment where you take a scrawny individual who would probably be washed out in other ways, and you experiment on him and you create this super soldier, but he’s still that same individual inside.
Steve Rogers, who was last seen as an elderly man at the end of Avengers: Endgame, is still alive, it doesn’t seem likely we’ll see him and Isaiah Bradley meet. So hearing Carl Lumbly share his thoughts on this subject was quite the treat. And besides, at least Isaiah has a Captain America in his corner through Sam Wilson.
With Captain America: Brave New World behind us, Thunderbolts* is the next upcoming Marvel movie, arriving on May 2, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps follows on July 25. Carl Lumbly can next be seen in The Life of Chuck, which starts playing in theaters on June 6.