Chris Evans
“I don’t like a dirty mouth”
Sitting in the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Chris Evans offers a grin so wide and white it could only belong to Captain America. “I am obsessively nuts about my teeth,” he says when Total Film remarks that it’s little wonder his father is a dentist. “I brush my teeth, like, six times a day. I wake up in the middle of the night and brush my teeth. I don’t like a dirty mouth. I don’t like bad breath. I have, right now, in my pockets, cinnamon and mints. I don’t leave home without them.”
Oral hygiene sorted, followed by a quick segue into facial hair (“I really like having a beard and it helps me live with a certain amount of privacy. When you first start growing it out, you are a real porcupine, but then after maybe a week, 10 days, it starts to get soft…”), it’s time to get to the matter at hand:
Gifted, in which Evans plays a single man raising his child prodigy niece, Mary (Mckenna Grace), only for his own mother (Lindsay Duncan) to engage him in a custody battle. A low-key, unapologetically sentimental drama, it nonetheless offers overlap with Cap (much like the politically outspoken Evans himself: “I have a really hard time being quiet if I am passionate about something”). His character Frank is all-American and staunchly committed to his cause, only here he’s duking it out not with Iron Man or the Winter Soldier but in the courts, against a single-minded, selfish and mercenary adversary.
Evans is not offended by the comparison. “God, if I hadn’t played Captain America, I don’t think I would have ever had the opportunity to play this character,” he shrugs. “It’s so funny because for the majority of my career, I have been playing these guys who have this taciturn reticence. They are men of few words and they are leaders and selfless… and that’s not me, because I wear my emotions on
my sleeve and I’m wildly talkative.” He tugs at his beard. “But Frank is not a hero. Frank is a man who probably has a little bit of shame and probably thinks he could have been a better man and wasn’t. He thinks his sister died as a result of this, and he takes on that guilt. He’s trying to wrestle that guilt but is not vocal and doesn’t have an outlet to express this conflict.”
Evans had a ball working with Grace, a precocious 10-year-old who was forever reeling off her bucket list, and who taught him the importance of having “plain, simple fun”, plus he dated co-star Jenny Slate for a time, though they’ve since split. Now 35, he appears to be getting broody, but he stresses this is nothing new – his sister and friends all have kids, and he’s always wanted to be a father. “But I’m not married and don’t have any kids that I know of,” he concludes, flashing the grin. It twitches, crumples. “Why do men say that? It’s such a trashy thing to say. It’s gross, not charming. Such a pig thing to say.”
As for Evans’ own childhood, he was born in Boston, in June 1981, and moved to the suburb of Sudbury aged 11, where he became involved in school productions and community theatre. His father, the dentist, and mother, an artistic director at the Concord Youth Theater, encouraged him to pursue his passion (“They knew I had potential or they might have gently tried to persuade me in another direction”), and his turn as Leontes in Shakespeare’s tragicomedy The Winter’s
Tale incited such purple praise from his high-school drama teacher that Evans packed his bags for the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York.
Between 2000 and 2011, his career gained momentum but never quite accelerated to the levels it was clear
he was destined to reach. He migrated from TV ( Opposite Sex, The Fugitive) to underwhelming teen movies ( Not Another Teen Movie, The Perfect
Score), then landed the lead in propulsive thriller Cellular, plus the role of Johnny Storm aka the Human Torch in Fantastic Four. That seemed sure to secure him a spot on the A-list, but the former wound up taking a respectablebut-far-from-star-making $56m at the box office, while the latter – and, indeed, its 2007 sequel – more flickered than flamed. This seemed to be the pattern of Evans’ career. Next up was playing a homicide detective in David Ayer’s Street Kings and one of the evil ex-boyfriends in Edgar Wright’s Scott
Pilgrim Vs. The World; neither ignited the box office (though Scott Pilgrim has since attained cult-classic status). Then, in 2011, came Captain America:
The First Avenger, in which Evans excels as the small-of-body, big-of-heart Steve Rogers, rejected by the military in 1942 before transforming into the titular hero courtesy of a dose of Super-Soldier serum. Superior sequels
Captain America: The Winter Solder and Captain America: Civil War followed, catapulting Cap into the modern world after decades of brain freeze in a block of ice, while Avengers Assemble and
Avengers: Age Of Ultron – to say nothing of cameos in Thor: The Dark World and
Ant-Man – have kept Evans’ schedule as tight as his muscles.
Next up, as if you didn’t know, is Avengers: Infinity War in April 2018, with Part 2 to follow in April 2019. And then? Well, according to reports that sent the internet into the biggest meltdown since Cap escaped his icy prison, it might just be time to hang up his shield to concentrate on more movies like Gifted, or to grow the directing career he seeded with 2014 romantic-dramedy Before We Go. Who knows? Not, it seems, Evans himself,
‘I feel very fortunate to be a part of a big-budget franchise that I believe is quality – Marvel movies compare to any indie’
who has recently flip-flopped between hinting that his time as Cap is up, and suggesting he’ll continue to don the body-hugging suit if his schedule can just be afforded a little wriggle room.
“I always wake up unsure of what I’m interested in,” he explains. “I’d like my creative appetite to dictate where I go, but even that changes with the wind. Gifted was a departure to what I’ve spent my professional life involved in, and it was absolutely satisfying. The beauty of film acting is you are afforded variety, and I am pretty mercurial by nature, regardless.” He shifts in his seat. “[ Blockbusters] take a long time; it’s a very tedious process. You spend a lot of your days in the trailer, waiting. You don’t have the luxury of money and time on a smaller film like Gifted, so you’re getting through seven, 10, 15 pages in a day, and as a result you go home feeling like you worked.”
Exploring new identities is clearly an attractive option, then. And how about the directing? “The inspiration for Before You Go was some of those beautiful festival movies, like Half Nelson or Blue Valentine or Like Crazy – hand-held, truthful stories shot with long lenses that make the audience feel very voyeuristic.
Before We Go had a conventional structure but I wanted character, subtlety, human drama.” And did he feel he succeeded? “It never goes exactly the way you planned. There were a lot of lessons learned. I’m glad I learned them on my first one and I’m really excited to do it again.”
But before you go thinking that all of the above indicates that Evans is indeed leaning towards exiting the MCU, it turns out that he is every bit as conflicted as Steve Rogers himself. Sure, Marvel movies require a lot of sitting around in your trailer feeling like the A on your headwear stands for A-hole, but he bristles (or at least sits forward) when it’s put to him that Martin Scorsese recently attributed the death of cinema to the rise of comic-book movies.
“What came first, the chicken or the egg?” he ponders. “Did the audience demand it or did the studio offer it? Because there’s no denying that the bigbudget movies are the things that keep these studios in business. We all know there’s a lot of crap out there, and that some of the best movies made, nobody has seen. That being said, I feel very fortunate to be a part of a big-budget franchise that I believe is quality. Marvel movies are good. They can compare to any small, independent film. I will defend Marvel in the sense that I know for a fact they care deeply about the creative arcs of all their characters and the through lines that have meaningful connections that we can relate to as people, beyond the explosions and capes.”
Fans will be ecstatic to hear such fighting words, and it should be reported that Evans’ prodigious pecs are visibly puffed with pride. And you know what? It might just be Evans’ affection for the fans that winds up swaying his decision as much as any paycheque or creative itch that needs scratching.
“I do a lot of those comic-book conventions and the die-hard fans are sweet,” he smiles, flashing those pearlies one last time. “Sometimes people have a hard time speaking; sometimes people have a hard time not crying or shivering! They come in with a plan, a whole idea of what they want to say, and then they see you and all that goes out the window. These people care so much and so deeply; you see and feel a lot of love.”
He pauses, laughs. “It’s different when someone notices me on the street in LA. They’re nice, but it doesn’t take long for them to say: ‘Hey, can I get this script I have and call you?’”
Whichever direction Evans takes his career in, you can be sure that screenplays will
not be in short supply.
Gifted opens on 16 June.