Carl Lumbly had a big year in 2025, playing Isaiah Bradley in ;Captain America: Brave New World’ and stealing scenes in ‘The Life of Chuck,’ one of the year’s best films. Lumbly played primetime television’s first Black superhero lead with the Fox series ‘M.A.N.T.I.S.’ in the 1990s.
Courtesy photo
By Bill Vaughan
Entertainment Writer
CARL LUMBLY graced the big screen this year reprising his character of Isaiah Bradley (“The Original Super Soldier”) in “Captain America: Brave New World” and once again stealing scenes in one of the year’s best films, “The Life of Chuck.”
When the busy veteran actor, whose credits include “Men of Honor,” “Night John,” “South Central,” “To Sleep With Anger,” and “Doctor Sleep,” spoke to TASTY CLIPS in 2025, it was to speak on his fascination with Miles Davis and his participation in giving voice to the words of the iconic jazz trumpeter for the Stanley Nelson-directed documentary “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool.”
He listened to interviews to get a physical sense of Miles’ voice and his phrasing which he described as “that St. Louis, Missouri syncopated speech that he had.”
He also studied Quincy Troupe’s book, ‘Miles and Me,” where much of the text that was used in the film comes from.
According to Lumbly, who counts “Tutu,” “Kind of Blue,” “Birth of the Cool,” “On the Corner” and the recently released “Rubber Band” among his favorite albums: “Every goodbye ain’t gone. Miles’ influence, especially on the generations coming behind him and his relevance, his pertinence, his prescience, he was one for the ages.”
“Some of his behaviors I would not want to model for anyone, and I don’t know that he wanted to model them, but he played the hand he was given. He fell prey certainly to drugs and to some of the vulnerabilities that fame can bring. He came up in a time where his relationships with women were not always of the highest integrity, but he was honest about who he was and how he represented himself.”
Despite having such a tumultuous life, Lumbly, in his research, couldn’t recall finding any examples of Miles admitting regret.
“I think his sense was I am who I am,” he said. “I got through it the best I could. I think right up to the day of his passing he was still becoming.”
The prolific star made a most memorable mark in the mid-90s as primetime television’s first Black superhero lead with the Fox series “M.A.N.T.I.S.”
He has continued in the genre doing voice work as D.C.’s J’onn J’onzz/Martian Manhunter in the Cartoon Network’s animated “Justice League,” as the character’s father in the live-action CW series “Supergirl,” and the Marvel/Disney + mini-series “The Falcon & The Winter Soldier.”
Lumbly had an interesting response to directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese opining that comics-based films are less than cinema.
“I think every fox knows its own hole best,” he said. “I would posit that for some people films glamorizing crime organizations that litter the streets with bullet-ridden bodies might not be someone’s cup of tea, no matter how beautifully rendered the depiction is.”
“It’s always about a story. Comics have taken the hit of being frivolous and escapist but point of fact, many scenes that could not be addressed in standard literature have been addressed in comics.”
He takes issue that in many of Scorsese’s films, Black people are either absent or too free in using the N word in his depiction of Black people.
“Those films, while they were of use, there were also some things I found pretty reprehensible and certainly did not represent Black people in total — or at all,” he added.
“I look at Woody Allen’s films and I would quarrel with the worlds that he chooses to show in that I don’t think, especially as a New Yorker, it represents the world that I see when I go there. But I don’t think some of his films are artistically challenged, even if I feel they’re sociologically challenged, because art can be found by many different eyes. And just because my eye doesn’t like it, it doesn’t mean it’s not art.”
With much of what he considers his best work on the stage including his portrayal of poet/composer Gil Scott-Heron behind him, Lumbly was writing a one-man show on James Baldwin.
“It’s what comes to you to make yourself fertile soil,” said the then 68-year-old. “It catches me off guard in a way because I’ve had the good fortune to being able to become, I’ll say seasoned even though we know the old word is what I mean in this business.”
“I kind of flaunt this idea that I was being pulled into old age but it’s actually more like something I feel like I’ve climbed. I’ve achieved an ascendancy, not in terms of the industry, but in terms of my own hopes and desires of the kind of artist I can be and there’s no top to that. You can’t reach the summit of your own creativity because that means you’ve stopped creating.”
In closing, I asked about the legacy of his late wife, Vonetta McGee, who starred in many classics of Black cinema including “Melinda,” “Blacula,” “Shaft in Africa,” “Brothers,” and “Thomasine & Bushrod.”
“She was definitely my hero,” Lumbly said, stricken by emotion in her memory. “She was the brightest star in the heavens. She was encyclopedic. She had an intelligence that was not fully appreciated because her physical beauty was so astounding. It’s kind of like, I suppose, you can’t really stare into the sun. But I did. And I was not alone.
I think she also had an amazing heart. Truly understood at an early age that she had to marshal her will to live and I think she was one of the true miracles of humanity. I think anyone who knew her was privileged. I thought my standards were pretty high, but I far surpassed anything I could’ve ever dreamed of in my partnership with her.
It’s not always easy to talk about Vonetta. There is not enough known about her. When she passed, Vonetta was a private person. And so, I feel a certain responsibility to honor that certainly with regard to our life together, but I do think what is out there for the public domain makes for a wonderful and an inspirational story.
I do think in her career and certainly after her career there has not been enough done about her. We stand on the shoulders of others and I’m not certain some of my sisters realize that she had broad shoulders.”
For more than 11 years, Bill Vaughan has kept Wave readers up to date with the latest news in entertainment. Now, we are collecting some of those past columns into what we call the Best of Tasty Clips. To contact Vaughan, visit his social media pages on Facebook and Instagram or @tasty_clips, on X @tastyclips, and on LinkedIn to William Vaughan.
