After seven years as Captain America, Chris Evans is preparing to shed the spandex and flex his dramatic muscles and just be footloose, fancy free

mechanic named Frank, whose seven-year-old niece and ward, Mary, turns out to be a mathematics prodigy of internationally significant talent.

It cost as much to make as four minutes of the last Captain America film, and is a blockbuster detox for both Evans and its director, Marc Webb, who came to it bloody and bruised from The Amazing SpiderMan 2.

Evans had originally hoped to direct the film himself: it would have been his second such job, after an earnest, meandering 2014 romantic drama called Before We Go, in which love springs from a missed train connection. But by the time he’d thought it over the gig had already gone to Webb.

All the same, he was happy to star in it: “Those Captain America movies are great. I’m proud of every one of them, but on set they’re giant factories and we spend a lot of time sitting around.”

Having last spoken to him on the set of Captain America: Civil War in August 2015, I can corroborate the story: during the course of one day, I watched the actor shoot a single scene in which his character holsters his shield, and he didn’t even have a shield to work with. (It was added digitally later.)

“But on a movie like Gifted, you come home every day and feel like you got to ‘act’!” he glows.

“You feel exhausted. You get through eight, nine pages of dialogue. On Captain America, you might get through two pages per day, if you’re lucky. And that’s fine, it’s a different process,” he adds.

“But there’s something refreshing about that intimate exchange with the other people involved in a smaller film. You feel like you get your hands dirty.”

One of those people was the actress and comedian Jenny Slate, who plays Mary’s teacher and, later, Frank’s love interest. Slate and Evans’s romance is so glowingly persuasive that it’s no surprise that the actors became a real-world couple for nine months when filming concluded, shortly after Slate had separated from her husband, Dean Fleischer-Camp.

They met after Evans had already been cast, during a series of “chemistry reads” – shared screen Charlize Theron in Monster).

“You don’t want to do that just for the sake of optics,” says Evans, whose last unabashedly hideous role was as a mob assassin in The Iceman (2012). “I’ve never been one to preoccupy myself with how I’m perceived.”

The couple split in February – partly, says Slate, because Evans’s super-heroic public profile made the actual mechanics of dating in Los Angeles next to impossible. In light of that, you can appreciate why shooting a small film in the quiet coastal towns around Savannah, Georgia, held so much appeal for him between blockbusters.

“It felt like summer camp,” he beams. “We were all away from our friends and family, so we became each other’s.” In the evenings, cast and crew bonded over board games – Evans’s idea. “I love a good game night,” he says. “My family is very competitive. Monopoly back home usually turns into a screaming match.”

Back home is small-town Massachusetts, where Evans was raised in what he describes as “a family of theatre lunatics”. When he was 16, his mother, Lisa, became the artistic director of the youth theatre company where he and his three siblings spent much of their teenage years.

Unlike Mckenna Grace, his ebullient 10-year-old Gifted co-star, he lacked the confidence to be a child actor. “I was a shy little kid,” he says. “I really liked art – drawing and painting – and that’s what I thought I was going to do.”

But on leaving high school in 1998, he was set on course. He moved to New York, took acting classes at the Lee Strasberg