Stephen McFeely

Going from Narnia to the Marvel Universe isn't a trip a lot of people get to make, but Stephen McFeely got the once-in-a-lifetime chance to do so when he finished up working on three "Chronicles of Narnia" movies as a screenwriter and then went over to work on "Captain America" and "Thor" movies for Marvel. Working with his longtime partner Christopher Markus, McFeely carved a role as a reliable screenwriter for well-received blockbuster movies. McFeely's first career was as English teacher at his old high school following his graduation from the University of Notre Dame. He toiled away as a teacher before he finally quit his job and went back to school to study Creative Writing at the University of California at Davis. It was at UC Davis that he met his writing partner Markus. However, it took many years past their time at UC Davis before the pair were officially a professional writing team. In the early 2000s, the pair pitched "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" (HBO 2004), a made-for-TV movie starring Geoffrey Rush as Sellers that wound up garnering Markus and McFeely an Emmy Award. They followed that up with "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" (2005), the first of three big-budget Narnia movies from Disney. They worked on the film's two sequels, "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" (2008) and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" (2010), though they only did a draft of the latter as they were let go from the project during the 2008 Writers Guild Strike. During the Narnia movies, they also wrote the crime comedy "You Kill Me" (2007), starring Tea Leoni and Ben Kingsley. After their time in Narnia, the writing partners started working in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, first writing "Captain America: The First Avenger" (2011) before working on "Thor: The Dark World" (2013) and "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" (2014) back-to-back. At the same, they also wrote "Pain & Gain" (2013), an action comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson and directed by Michael Bay. Following the success of the second "Captain America" movie, it was announced that Markus and McFeely would script its follow-up.