Anthony Mackie shifts gears for the post-apocalyptic thriller ‘Twisted Metal’

Anthony Mackie plays a post-apocalyptic delivery driver — think of DoorDash, but much more dangerous — in Peacock’s series adaptation of the video game Twisted Metal, debuting Thursday, July 27.

Mackie’s character drives a beat-up 1990s sports car that is deceptively deadly — a far cry from his first set of wheels, “a 1985 Nissan Sentra,” he told ABC Audio in an interview done before the SAG-AFTRA strike started.

“It was a disaster,” he continues. “In New Orleans, we used to call them bird cars. So some mechanic would get a car from the junkyard, fix it up and sell it to you for like 600 bucks. So he sold me this Nissan Sentra. It had a back seat and a driver’s seat. No passenger seat. It had a radio, no air conditioning. And the radio I put in myself with my cousin and it was like a house radio with speakers in a trunk.”

And topping Mackie’s playlist back then? “It would be A Tribe Called Quest, Midnight Marauder. I played that until it just exploded,” he shares. “Tupac [Shakur]. And then one of the greatest CDs ever released was De La Soul, Me, Myself, and I. Those were my, like, constant rotation in my car.”

Mackie said he actually got to do some of his driving stunts, which you’ll see in an abandoned mall in episode 1.

“I got to like burn out through the mall a little bit and jump out the window and all that stuff,” he recalls. “A lot of the mall stuff actually, I got to do. So we were, I was pressing the limits, like ripping through the mall. I wanted to see. And I’m like, if I wreck, who cares? We’re in a mall that’s closed down.”

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