Chris Evans

Chris Evans is trying to recover from a decade of playing Captain America, said Zach Baron in GQ. Inhabiting the role of the beloved, almost flawless superhero for seven blockbusters was a deeply weird experience for Evans, a former New England theater kid with anxiety problems and few friends, who happened to be born with a Marvelworthy square jaw. He was aware of the trade-off that might come with making tens of millions of dollars for carrying that iconic red, white, and blue shield. “The pros,” he says, “were that I’d be able to take care of my family forever; the cons were that I would become deeply, deeply unhappy with fame and loss of control.” Evans, 42, is painfully self-aware that he risks coming off as whiny and self-absorbed—and utterly unlike Captain America. Playing a character like that, he says, “you can’t help but try to absorb some of their traits and measure yourself against them.” His goal lately is to step back from the leading-man life and to live more in the now, just like his dog Dodger, whom Evans used to post about on Instagram before suddenly deleting his account this summer. “He’s not thinking about yesterday. He’s not worried about tomorrow. He’s just so honest, so pure. He has no idea that I’m famous. I mean, he’s famous and he’ll never know. He can’t be corrupted.”