IT’S an hour before showtime, but Anthony Mackie isn’t sweating it. Sitting on a bench near Central Park’s Dela corte Theater, one of the stars of “The Bacchae,” opening tonight, is people- watching and sipping a root beer float from the concession stand.
“I have one every day before the show,” he says. “When was the last time you were somewhere they had root beer floats?”
Mackie, 29, charming and chill, is totally at odds with the hot-headed man he plays — the young king of Thebes, who angers the god Dionysus (Jonathan Groff).
This being a Greek tragedy, things do not end well — but even Euripides couldn’t have scripted the brilliant encore to Tuesday’s performance. Just moments after the Public Theater’s cast took their bows, a wrath-of-Zeus-style thunderstorm descended, uprooting scores of trees.
“We were like, ‘Please, God, just get us off the stage,’ ” Mackie recalls. “By the time we walked to the train, it was like a hurricane was coming up Central Park West!”
The New Orleans native can handle the heat and rain, and he likes the bold raccoons that wander onstage and under patrons’ seats. But the mosquitos, he says, “are f – – – in’ bastards.”
Doing Shakespeare in the Park, Mackie says, is one of a New York actor’s rites of passage (the other — appearing on “Law & Order” — he got under his belt years ago).
Mackie’s better prepared than most for standing under the hot lights during an August heat wave. He shot “The Hurt Locker,” about a US bomb squad in Iraq, in Jordan. In the summer.
“It was so desperately hot, and we were so easily agitated,” he says. “But that movie was like doing a play. We really looked out for each other, and it was a great experience. It made me believe in film.”
That hasn’t always been the case for Mackie, who’s appeared in two Spike Lee movies, as well as the action hit “Eagle Eye” and “Notorious.”
“In film,” he continues, “there’s this hierarchy. You don’t get to hang out with the No. 1 guy on the call sheet, and you don’t get to hang out with the No. 50 guy. You’re in your little tier, with your little group of people, and it’s very isolating and very segregating.”
To de-stress, he heads for New Orleans, where he recently bought an antebellum mansion “for, like, nothing.” He’ll fish and play golf and hang out with his girlfriend — whom he first met in the third grade. He also has an apartment in Brooklyn, where he stays when he’s playing on, or off, Broadway.
“My friends from Juilliard who decided they wanted to be movie stars? They’ve become movie stars, and they’re in LA making a lot of money. And if you don’t have a play for them with, like, Brian Dennehy or Cherry Jones or Meryl Streep, they’re not interested.”
Mackie, on the other hand, has been all over the theater map. He’s done several 24-Hour Plays, as well as “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” on Broadway, alongside Whoopi Goldberg and Charles Dutton.
“I would love the opportunity to play some of those meatier roles,” he says. “I would love to do ‘True West’ or Chekhov . . . I lose interest when people call me, like, ‘We have this great black role.’ I’m a black dude in real life! I’m already doing that.”
His next role will be on-screen, playing Buddy Bolden, a founder of improvisational jazz. His musical coach, as it happens, was the first person he met in New York: Wynton Marsalis.
“There used to be this deli near Lincoln Center, and my brother and I were sitting outside, the first day I got here,” he says.
“I look up, and Wynton Marsalis is walking by! So I run up to him, like, ‘I’m Anthony, I’m 17, I’m at Juilliard, I’m from New Orleans!’ And he wrote down his home number. He said, ‘If you need anything, give me a call.’ ”
Mackie did. And? “He proceeded to beat me at basketball every weekend for the next two years.”