Empire Spotlight: Danny Ramirez Is Taking Flight In The MCU – And Beyond

The Captain America: Brave New World actor plays by his own rules.

When it comes to Danny Ramirez, football’s loss was cinema’s gain. All his life, Ramirez had had one goal. “As a little kid, I was like, ‘There’s only one thing I’m going to be when I grow up, and it’s a pro athlete,” he tells Empire. A lifelong love for soccer led him to play the sport at college in Atlanta, until one day, on crutches and unable to play due to a recent injury, his life changed. “A PA from a film came in to ask if [any of us wanted to be] extras,” says Ramirez. The film was The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Ramirez got to watch its star, Riz Ahmed, try to pull off some slick moves on the pitch. Before that point, Ramirez had never even considered that as a career. “The next day is when I bought all my acting books.”

That was over a decade ago. Since then, Ramirez has applied the same approach to acting that he did to being an athlete. “This is a craft- based process,” he says. “In the same way I work on my first touch, I could work on my emotional resonance, or people-watching, or psychology.”

"The hustle keeps me reinvigorated."

Career-wise, he’s gone from strength to strength. The 32-year-old, Chicago-born, Miami-raised Ramirez may not have realised his dream of playing professional soccer as a right midfielder, but he managed to end up on the wing, alright. First, flying in a fighter plane as Fanboy in Top Gun: Maverick, and now as Joaquin Torres, aka the new Falcon, in Captain America: Brave New World. It’s a role that he’s been prepping for some time, as it turns out. “I was already cosplaying it as a little kid,” he laughs, recalling a time when, as a six or seven year old, he fashioned some wings and tried to fly off the second storey of his grandmother’s house in Mexico. “I crash-landed,” he says. “I knocked myself out. My family were like, ‘Dan, you cannot fly.’ With this and Top Gun, I have definitely won that argument.”

Ramirez’s commitment to his career is commendable. He calls it “the hustle”, a relentless drive for self-improvement. “There’s a joy in the challenge, right?” he says. “The hustle keeps me reinvigorated. It’s always, ‘What have I learned from the previous project? What do I want to do in my next?’”

He’s fearless, too. When Joaquin Phoenix and Todd Haynes united for a 1930s-set movie that would have explored the love story between a cop and a younger man, Ramirez bagged the latter role, unruffled by the prospect of the film’s graphic love scenes. “Beyond the risky sex scenes, it was a moment where I was like, ‘I could throw down with anyone,’” says Ramirez, who won the part after a chemistry read with Phoenix. “It was a moment where I felt like I’d arrived.”

Sadly, Phoenix pulled out of the movie just five days before shooting was due to begin. “I was heartbroken for Todd, and understood that the decision for Joaquin was incredibly difficult too,” Ramirez says. “I felt worse for the people that were affected on the ground. But the project’s hopefully still happening. I’m hopeful that the story will be lived out.”

One door closes. Another opens. The hustle never stops: next, Ramirez will be seen in Season 2 of The Last Of Us as Manny, a soldier with a sunny disposition (“I saw some clips in ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement),” he says. “It’s gonna fuck people up. It’s so good.”). But he’s mainly focusing on his directorial debut, Baton. Which, despite the title, is about something close to his heart: soccer. “There was just no soccer movie that I liked,” says Ramirez, who also wrote the screenplay and, via an assist from Tom Cruise, persuaded David Beckham to sign up as producer. “My soccer experience is a very grounded, visceral one. It just feels like the thing I’ve been prepping for my entire life.” Cinema’s gain might also be football’s gain at long last.

The Podcast: Huberman Lab

“Andrew Huberman is a Stanford neuroscience professor. It’s more about awareness. I was listening to him from the pandemic. At that point he had 70,000 followers. Now he’s in the eight million range. He’s the guy now.”

The Show: The Sopranos

“I don’t rewatch things, so I have to curate the experience. The Sopranos, I’m on Episode 6, and I have to remember there’s a finite resource here. By the time it’s the end, I don’t want to be like, ‘I rushed through that.’”

The Book: The Labyrinth Of Solitude – Octavio Paz

“I’m finally finishing [it]. I have six tabs open right now in my books [app]. And that’s the main one. The others I started flip-flopping, and I never do that.”

This article originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Empire. Photography by Jennifer McCord, shot exclusively for Empire in Los Angeles. Captain America: Brave New World is out now in cinemas.