Meet Julius Onah, the Nigerian Immigrant Now Telling Captain America’s Story

Julius Onah was 11 and still getting used to life in the United States when he saw a courageous everyman stand up to power.

It was the summer of 1994, and he was watching Harrison Ford as intelligence officer Jack Ryan in the political thriller Clear and Present Danger. In the finale of the movie, Ford’s loyalty to his country and the rule of law leads him to confront President James Bennett (Donald Moffat) after uncovering the White House’s collusion with an international drug cartel. “Oh my God, when I first moved to America, there were two movies that I saw in theaters, which were my first times seeing a movie,” Onah says. “The Lion King was the first one, and then the second one was Clear and Present Danger, which was huge for me.”

That little boy, who’d just moved from Nigeria to the United States with his family, would not have believed that 30 years later he’d direct his own movie, with Ford playing the president this time, and Anthony Mackie as the heroic American service member who challenges him when he believes things are going awry.

Onah, now 41, is the director of the latest Marvel Studios movie, Captain America: Brave New World, picking up the story of Mackie’s winged superhero as he embraces the mantle of the red, white, and blue do-gooder. “I remember being in New York busing tables and going through all the difficulties, and the limbo at times of the [citizenship] process, and dreaming of making films,” he says. “Never in my wildest imagination did I think it would lead to making a Captain America film.”

This movie is actually the culmination of several of Onah’s dreams. One was to helm a big-budget action adventure after working for years on the indie scene, making scrappy crime dramas like 2015’s The Girl Is in Trouble, which was produced by Spike Lee, or the 2019 Sundance Festival drama Luce, which starred Naomi Watts and Octavia Spencer. In 2018, J.J. Abrams produced Onah’s sci-fi horror film The Cloverfield Paradox, but a Marvel movie stands as a major level-up for the filmmaker. Plus, it stars the actor who, along with an animated Disney lion, introduced him to moviegoing itself—and what it means to be an honorable leader. “To have Harrison be in this film, you can’t make it up,” Onah says. “Then you go to his house, and you’re like, ‘Holy, holy, wow.’”

That’s one of the reasons Onah believes so strongly in his adopted homeland. “I know what it’s like to have to aspire and try to strive for access to the American dream,” he says.

Before their family settled in the US, Onah, his twin brother, Anthony (who also became a filmmaker), and their three older sisters lived at various places around the world. Born in Nigeria, he spent time in the Philippines and the United Kingdom as a child before his father, Adoga Onah, who worked as a diplomat for their home country, brought them to Washington, DC, during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

As his father served for five years in the Nigerian embassy, Julius lived in Arlington, Virginia, and became steeped in the culture of the nearby US capital. Among his most vivid memories as a boy were the blossoming cherry trees, which appear throughout Captain America: Brave New World. Asked what they represent to him, Onah answers: “Empathy. When you think back to the history of those cherry blossoms, they were donated by the Japanese ambassador and the Japanese government to the United States. There’s an element of connection, of moving past differences. It roots back to the themes that I think are so essential to this movie.”

When his father later took a new position, representing Nigeria in North Korea, the twins and their mother stayed in the US. “Obviously, with the support of the Nigerian government when we first came here, there was a certain degree of comfort. When that was gone, there was a certain degree of hardship,” he says. “On one hand I was the son of a deputy-slash-acting-ambassador, and then on the other hand I was a son of a working-class mother who worked at McDonald’s. It was two extremes that I got to live very quickly.”

Julius maintained his obsession with movies, studying theater at Wesleyan University and filmmaking at New York University, where he met Spike Lee, a professor at the school, who hired him as an intern. When he’d completed an array of shorts, Filmmaker magazine named Onah one of its 25 new faces of 2010. A year later, he became an American citizen, and was scrabbling to get his script for The Girl Is in Trouble made into a feature. That took another four years.

“So much of what has been possible for me in my life has been because I became an American,” he says. “Looking at it as an outsider, when you get that blue passport, that is such a massive transformative moment. I still remember the day I walked from my apartment on the Lower East Side downtown to swear in and become a citizen. I went back to my apartment and I cried because the promise of what the country represents means so much to you when it’s not something that you were necessarily born with.”

Directing a Captain America movie has unique challenges, even within the superhero pantheon. From the character’s very inception, writer Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby imagined the shield-wielding super-soldier as a symbol of national honor and decency. “Captain America Comics #1” went on sale in December 1940 with a cover that featured the hero punching Adolph Hitler in the face. Draped in the colors of America, Cap was knocking out Germany’s fascist dictator a full year before Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor vaulted the US into the global conflict of World War II.

The 2011 film Captain America: The First Avenger came out right around the time Onah was completing his citizenship. Thanks to the magic of visual effects, Chris Evans played Steve Rogers first as a scrawny, smallish young man in relatively frail health who nonetheless longs to serve his country. The character knows what it’s like to be weak, so even when a super-soldier serum allows him to become astoundingly strong, he always uses that power to defend those who have none. As he played the character over the course of a decade, Evans’ Captain America fought on behalf of his country, but also clashed with government officials whose cynical schemes sometimes betrayed the nation’s principles.

Steve Rogers handed over his shield to his friend Sam Wilson in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, but Mackie’s character was initially hesitant, saying it felt like it didn’t belong to him. The 2021 series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier delved deeper into Wilson’s doubts about shouldering the red, white, and blue uniform. As a veteran, he felt discarded by the country he once defended, hitting hard financial times after the fighting was over, with no relief in sight. And as a Black man, he was appalled to uncover that the super-soldier serum was used in twisted experiments on other Black soldiers, mirroring the real-life Tuskegee medical tests that the American government performed for 40-plus years on unsuspecting Black citizens. (In 1997, two decades after the tests ceased, President Clinton apologized for the experiments as “shameful,” calling the government’s actions “deeply, profoundly, morally wrong.)

In the Marvel story, the only survivor of the super-soldier experiments was Isaiah Bradley (played by Carl Lumbly), who was wrongfully imprisoned to hide what was done to him. He scorns Mackie’s Sam Wilson for taking on the mantle of Captain America, but Wilson decides that standing as a symbol of the United States means he can also fight to ensure the country lives up to its highest ideals.

When Wilson trades the title of Falcon for Captain America, however, he refuses to fortify himself with the super-soldier serum. Brave New World explores why. “That means that what he does as Captain America, what he leans into as his superpower, is something that we all have within us as well,” Onah says.

Throughout the comic books and movies, Captain America has served not only as the nation’s protector, but also its conscience. That’s true of the new film as well. It debuts, however, at a fraught political time, when self-reflection is denounced by some as unpatriotic.

Despite the seemingly intractable division and hostility of real life, Onah sees the big-budget escapism of Brave New World as a metaphor for ordinary people overcoming those fissures that have ripped through our society. “There’s a line towards the end of the movie that is really, really important to me: ‘If we can’t see the good in each other, we’ve already lost the fight,’” Onah says. “I think it speaks to the moral obligation that we all have to each other in a shared society, even when we might see things differently.”

Ford’s character, President Thaddeus Ross, isn’t necessarily deceitful, like the commander in chief in Clear and Present Danger, but he is misguided at times and occasionally gives in to anger—which leads him to explode into the rage-monster known as Red Hulk. (How he becomes this creature is a spoiler for the movie itself to reveal.) At the beginning of Captain America: Brave New World, President Ross and Mackie’s Sam Wilson have forged a tentative alliance, patching over a mistrustful and combative history.

In previous Marvel movies, “Thunderbolt” Ross (then played by the late William Hurt) was an antagonistic force, seeking to control and restrict those with superpowers. He had Falcon literally stripped of his wings and jailed in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. Now that Wilson has taken on the mantle of Captain America, the two attempt to reconcile their differences but are forced apart again by disagreement over the source of an assassination conspiracy that once again frames Isaiah Bradley as an enemy of the state.

The characters played by Mackie and Ford come from very different worlds and perspectives, but are aligned in ways that go deeper than the surface. “Even the optics it presents might at times feel like divisions or fractures,” Onah says. “What this movie can do is to remind us of what is shared.”

Amid the daily outrages in the real world’s news, and efforts by some political figures to stoke division, Onah hopes Brave New World brings people together. “When I first came here, what I loved was that I could sit in a theater and look around and everybody was different from me, but we were all having a shared emotional experience, a psychological experience, a cultural experience,” he says. “That is why I always wanted to make movies…. I won’t call that necessarily a political act, but it’s a very human act. It’s a very powerful act that can have political resonance to it.”

Onah recalled Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige’s reaction when he sought to add a line about seeing the good in each other to the script: “I think it was, ‘Julius wants to save America,” the director says. “He joked a little bit about the notion of bringing America together, but at the same time, he leaned into it and so did everybody at Marvel. These themes speak to the core of who Captain America is, and also speak to the core of who Sam Wilson is. Pollyanna-ish or not, that kind of earnestness is something that I think is essential to a character who dresses up in a flag.”

Just hours after Onah spoke to Vanity Fair for this story, a social media controversy erupted over Brave New World when Mackie, at a Q&A to promote the film, made remarks that some right-wing influencers attacked as insufficiently patriotic. “For me, Captain America represents a lot of different things, and I don’t think the term ‘America’ should be one of those representations,” Mackie said in a widely circulated video clip. “It’s about a man who keeps his word, who has honor, dignity, and integrity. Someone who is trustworthy and dependable.”

On Instagram, Mackie later sought to clarify the remarks, suggesting that he meant the hero’s admirable qualities were not exclusively limited to one country. (This is something Evans also said repeatedly when he first began playing the role.) “Let me be clear about this, I’m a proud American and taking on the shield of a hero like Cap is the honor of a lifetime,” Mackie wrote in his follow-up to the controversy. “I have the utmost respect for those who serve and have served our country. Cap has universal characteristics that people all over the world can relate to.”

Onah addressed Mackie’s remarks in a later email to Vanity Fair. “Things at times get misinterpreted. Speaking for myself, I approached this film with a very specific point of view,” he wrote, saying he wanted to emphasize “the sense of community, which is something I personally have experienced in various ways while living in the US. Another thing that stuck out was the idea of empathy, which in my opinion is Sam Wilson’s superpower. That to me is not just timely but incredibly important.”

In our original interview, Onah said that Sam Wilson is no longer conflicted about being Captain America. He knows who he is beneath the uniform, and knows he can do good by carrying that iconic shield. “That question has been resolved,” the director says. “Sam is our Captain America now. He’s our hero.”

Onah added that the character of Wilson is drawing upon something that has always been in him, from long before he had a superhero identity. “Here’s a guy who became an Air Force pararescue man. That is one of the most dangerous special forces positions you can take,” Onah says. “You are putting yourself in harm’s way to protect people, but that’s because you believe in something, you believe in other people. You believe in the idea and ideals of this country, and you believe that you have a place here just like everybody else.”