As we learned from talking to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier director Kari Skogland, series stars Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan were given a fair amount of freedom on set when it came to their scenes together as the titular superpowered odd couple. "I thought, 'Well, all I have to do is show up and point the camera,' because they will take care of the rest. They're terrific at ad-libbing and doing improv together, so they keep it very organic and real," she said to Collider.
This was pretty apparent in the scene in Episode 2, "The Star-Spangled Man," which features Bucky and Sam confronting their issues with each other. In that scene, of course, a third character was present — Dr. Christina Raynor (Amy Aquino), the therapist who attempts to use couples counseling techniques to get these two men to talk to each other.
Aquino's resume is packed with a wide range of roles that do often, as she explains below, fall into one of two categories: medical or law enforcement. (Most of those character names are preceded by either "Dr.", "Judge," or "Lieutenant.") But while she's played therapists before, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier offered a fresh spin on the challenge, as it's established from the beginning that Dr. Raynor isn't just a therapist, but a former soldier who still keenly remembers the life. It makes her well-suited to try to help Bucky process his past, and also, as Aquino tells Collider below, meant the actress got a front-row seat for the Mackie and Stan show.
It's a pleasure to speak with you, especially given that you've had one of those careers where you've been in so many different projects — it seems like this is not the first time you've played a therapist, but it's definitely the first time you played a therapist with this background.
AMY AQUINO: Yes. That is exactly true. I've played some other therapists. I've been a professional, I've been either in medicine/therapy, or I've been in law enforcement a lot. But I think this is the first time I'm playing a soldier.
And it's one of the things that really appealed to me about Dr. Raynor, is the fact that she is a former soldier. So she's coming with experience with trauma, and with PTSD, and with credibility when it comes to someone having to deal with being forced to kill people. Which is Bucky's story. That's what a soldier is. It doesn't matter if you look that person in the eye and you think that, "Oh my gosh, this is a human being and they probably have a family." If you need to kill them, you need to kill them.
So that was very, very interesting to me. My other favorite role, frankly, in my career, maybe my favorite, was the therapist that I played in Felicity, which was completely the opposite. But I guess I like asking people uncomfortable questions.
There you go. You should be a journalist.
AQUINO: Exactly.
What was it like shooting the sequence in Episode 2, where basically it's just Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan playing opposite each other?
AQUINO: It was lovely because I had so little work to do. The two of them together... first of all, as human beings, they were lovely and they were very, very welcoming considering we had never met, but as actors so generous, so immediate, so in the moment. They bring so much history of the characters together that it was effortless — what they were doing was totally effortless, and that made it effortless for me because clearly, these were two guys who really did know each other, and hated each other, and cared about each other and all these other elements in there. So then my challenge as the therapist was "at what point do I actually intervene?" Because they're not sticking to exactly the script, and if there's great stuff going on, then you don't want to cut it off, you want to let it go. So it was really delightful.
Excellent. How much was there in terms of improv?
AQUINO: In those scenes, we all knew what the shape of the scene was supposed to be and what they needed to do and eventually get to, but the director, Kari, who's brilliant, they had to be able to just improv that within it, find their moments, just do it. They just had to be in the moment of doing it. There was no way to completely do it according to a script. So that was largely improv. Not the beginning and the end of it, we had to start where we started and we had to get to where we got with the point that I intervene, but everything in between, that was them. That was all these years of their relationship.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is streaming now on Disney+.