For Evans sake, it’s all over

CHRIS Evans must be the only man in Hollywood to win his own superhero franchise then pray for it to fail.

Back in 2010, the then-28-year-old actor signed a contract with Marvel Studios to appear in half a dozen films – both solo outings and ensemble jobs – as Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, the Avengers’ flaxen-quiffed moral compass.

“One of my biggest fears was that the movies were going to be good,” he says, stroking a beard so keenly edged that it might have been trimmed with a laser.

“Because if things worked out, I’d have to do all six of them. And, at the time, that was the most terrifying aspect of it; that it was going to be so dominating, so allencompassing.”

Seven years on, as that contract is about to come to a close with a two-part Avengers adventure, that’s more or less exactly what has happened.

But the actor, now 35 and stretched back in an armchair with a foxlike smile on his face, looks well on it.

Along with Pine, Pratt and Hemsworth, Evans is one of those Chris actors that seem to be everywhere nowadays: bright-eyed, blond-haired comic-book franchise leading men with a valiant screen presence that children fall in love with, and a chiseled, mildly insinuating edge that means their mothers often do likewise.

I’ve caught him fresh from the CBeebies studios in London, where he’s just recorded a rather apposite bedtime story, Shelly Becker and Eda Kaban’s Even Superheroes Have Bad Days, which was presumably commissioned by the BBC with both of those audiences in mind.

We’ve met to talk about the latest project the actor has managed to squeeze around his Captain America schedule. Called Gifted, it’s a film about a taciturn boat Institute on Saturdays, and worked at a casting agency during the week. After a few months, he was cast in a teen TV drama, Opposite Sex.

During his first flight to Los Angeles, he felt an uneasy mix of excitement and anxiety that he says still often comes over him as he arrives in the city. “Depending on where you are in your career, arriving in LA can feel like the most wonderful homecoming, or incredibly stressful. There are chapters in my life where it’s been the latter.”

Not that he’s likely to be waiting tables on rollerskates any time soon, but Evans is about to rediscover what being footloose and franchise-free feels like. When promotional duties on the latest two Avengers films wind up in 2019, so will his contract with Marvel, after nine increasingly lucrative years. He was paid $300 000 (R3.9-million) for Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011, though by Avengers: Age of Ultron, four years later, his pay-cheque had swollen to $7-million (R91-million).

It’s not quite the $40 million-apicture (R522-million) commanded by fellow Avenger Robert Downey Jr.

But it’s a sum he describes as having given him “breathing room” – “not just financial stability, but the profile that means smaller films can get on their feet as a result of your involvement; you can take more risks.”

Cap’s ultimate fate is a secret on a par with the nuclear launch codes.

“I’ve been on sets where you get a vibe that everyone’s making a different movie,” he says. “The director one, the actors another, the producers another one still. Marvel has a way of ensuring that on the day filming begins everyone is making the same meal.”

Right now, that might be Captain America’s last supper. But for Evans, that’s just for starters. — The Daily Telegraph