EVANS TESTS HIS RANGE
Superhero takes on new role
Gifted Opens wide across Canada on April 14.
After portraying The Human Torch in two Fantastic Four films, Chris Evans came close to turning down the Captain America part for typecasting reasons.
Obviously, he came to his superhero senses.
A bunch of wildly successful Marvel productions later, Evans is a get-a-movie-made bankable star thanks to his Steve Rogers’ incarnation.
During that superhero stretch, he’s also managed to keep his focus when so many others have lost theirs.
“You certainly see people change for the negative as a result of this industry,” says Evans at a Beverly Hills hotel suite. “They always say fame doesn’t make you bad, it just makes you more of what you already were. And I’d like to believe I had a pretty good head on my shoulders before.”
The 35-year-old also likes to test his talent with a change of cinema pace now and again. Take the independent film Gifted, for instance.
In the comedy-drama, he plays a single man raising his mathematics child prodigy niece (Mckenna Grace). Soon enough, he gets drawn into a custody battle with his mother (Lindsay Duncan) who wants her granddaughter to devote her life to mathematics.
Co-starring is Octavia Spencer, who plays a neighbour and friend. Jenny Slate is the child’s first grade teacher trying to navigate an appropriate future for her student.
Naturally, the key to the film is the relationship between Evans and Grace, but the veteran says he learned more from the newcomer than she did from him.
“Mckenna came to set every day and was full of life, and saying, ‘Hi’, to everybody,” says Evans. “She’s happy to be there and so watching someone so full of life go through the experience reminded me how lucky I am.”
Director Marc Webb, who had his breakout with the romantic comedy 500 Days of Summer, didn’t count on her enthusiasm alone. He made sure Evans and Grace spent lots of time together rehearsing before filming began.
As it was, Webb and Evans already knew they hired the child actor they needed after a long and involved process of auditioning young performers for the pivotal part.
“I remember auditioning for things when I was young and how nervous I was,” says Evans, who made his big screen debut at 18 in Not Another Teen Movie.
However, Grace stood out among her peers for a few reasons.
“Some of the kids were really nervous and some should have been a little more nervous,” Evans says. “Mckenna struck that balance, where you felt that she was nervous, but those nerves showed a maturity.”
In one key Gifted sequence, Grace shows her thespian sophistication. She has to slap Evans when the niece feels betrayed by her uncle — “McKenna was deployed and launched into it effortlessly.”
By most accounts, it was Evans who led the way with his casual style off camera and his commitment to his portrayal on camera.
Slate, who was dating Evans until their break up last February, confirms that the actor led by example on the Gifted set.
“Chris is always prepared and so in control of his performance,” she says.
He’ll take that dedication to his next film challenge called Red Sea Diving Resort, a drama based on a true Mossad spy story. Evans is set to play an Israeli agent leading an effort to rescue Ethiopian Jews trapped in Sudan during the early 1980s.
“It is another smaller film,” he says. “I think the beautiful part about acting is that you’re afforded the opportunity to engage in that kind of variety.
“Most actors I know are mercurial by nature, so if you do this one month, you want to so something else next month.” He’s not kidding himself, though. “The beautiful thing is Captain America affords me that chance so in my Captain America downtime I am always looking for things that touch different chords.”
It brings us to his Captain America future. The actor is under contract for two more Marvel movies; Avengers: Infinity War opening in May of 2018 and a fourth Avengers picture.
Marvel has the option of recasting the part or mimicking the comics and have either Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) or Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) transform into the new Captain America.
If the decision is left to Evans, he’ll return.
“It’s a part I love in movies that are done really well,” he says giving a ‘thumbs up’ signal.