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 was not the first pick for the Super Soldier Serum, but he soon proved himself to be the right candidate through his strength of character. While the United States didn’t get its army of super soldiers powered by Erskine’s serum, it gained someone who embodied the best ideals of the Red, White and Blue. As for Isaiah Bradley, Lumbly laid it out thusly:
It's the same thing for Isaiah. You take someone who has been dispossessed, who is fighting for a set of rights that he already has, is fighting for representation for his people that is respectful and that takes into account their love for their country. And then you undergo something that makes you, at the same time, one of the greatest possible champions for those ideals that you believe in and puts you at effect because you get betrayed by the arms that you are trying to link with in support of those ideals.
Isaiah Bradley was injected with the Super Soldier Serum during the Korean War, when Steve Rogers had already been frozen for half a decade. Unfortunately, he was thrown in prison for 30 years by the US government for disobeying orders by rescuing some of his fellow super soldiers from a POW camp. During that time, he was experimented on by both the CIA and HYDRA, and it was only thanks to a nurse who took pity on him and fabricated his death that Isaiah didn’t spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Isaiah didn’t come out of hiding when Steve Rogers was unfrozen, and who could blame him? As Carl Lumbly went on to tell me, both had much different experiences after being injected with their respective versions of the super soldier serum: one was propped up as one of the 20th century’s greatest heroes, the other had his heroic efforts buried. And yet, Lumbly also thinks Isaiah and Steve would have found common ground beyond their enhanced abilities, saying:
So both of them found themselves in places where they had tremendous physical strength, and maybe not the same kind of set of choices where their sensibilities, they might have to set aside because these bodies give them the ability to be martial and to affect through violence and brute force what they want in the world. I think that what that does to someone's mind, puts them in a similar place, and they could probably share with one another what surviving that looks like. And then I think they'd have a great time talking about, ‘Well, where are you now?
Now before any of you go a step further with this and ask who would win if Isaiah and Steve came to blows, hold your horses. Carl Lumbly has already heard this question many times and doesn’t think it’s a plausible scenario. As he put it:
You know, a lot of people ask who would win a fight between Isaiah Bradley and Steve Rogers? My thinking is, why would they fight? They're on the same side. They're literally in the same uniform.
Despite the fact that it still hasn’t been clarified if the main 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.
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