Chris Evans Once Compared Marvel Movies to Giant Factories
Chris Evans has been very grateful regarding his time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Still, he felt the superhero movies could sometimes be less rewarding than much smaller projects.
What Chris Evans felt about working on Marvel movies
The MCU was a huge success for Evans. Including cameos, the actor appeared in 11 Marvel movies. The franchise was very good to Evans. After Avengers Endgame, his net worth skyrocketed to $110 million according to celebrity net worth.
But he didn’t resign himself only to Marvel films during his long stint as Captain America. Evans would star in a few smaller projects in between saving the world to further expand his film resume. One of the films he starred in was Gifted. The 2017 drama saw Evans playing the Uncle of a mathematically gifted young girl. He also teamed up with filmmaker Marc Webb for the project, who had his own experience with superhero films.
Working on Gifted was completely different from shooting a Marvel movie. In some cases, Evans even felt smaller films were more rewarding.
“Those Captain America movies are great, and I’m proud of every one of them, but on set they’re giant f***ing factories, and we spend a lot of time sitting around,” Evans once told The Telegraph.
Ironically, Evans felt he was able to do more work in a drama like Gifted than on the large scale of a superhero project.
“But on a movie like Gifted you come home every day and you feel like you got to act,” he said. “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. 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.”
Chris Evans was afraid the Marvel movies would be good
Evans was so unsure about doing any Captain America movies that he turned the offer down twice. However, Marvel was determined to cast the actor at the time. Marvel executive Kevin Feige and casting director Sarah Halley Finn saw many big names for the project. Despite actors like John Krasinski and Ryan Philippe auditioning for the role, Finn felt Evans would embody the character the most.
“He was American. We’ve cast a lot of Brits, but we wanted to cast an American,” she recalled in an interview with Vanity Fair. “And a great actor and funny and charming and affable and all of that. But then beyond the obvious qualities, I think there were the other ones that were a little harder to discern: his humility, the sense that he had a moral compass, that he was very relatable. He has this vulnerability as well as strength, so we could take him from skinny Steve to Captain America.”
However, Evans was worried about the Marvel movies’ affect on his personal life.
“I like my privacy,” Evans said. “The good thing about movies is there’s a lot of freedom built in: you make a film and then you have time off. If one of those films hits and changes your life, you have the opportunity to . . . run away. If you want to. Take some time, reassess, and regroup.”
It was an opportunity he might not have had if he did a Marvel project. It wasn’t until he received a phone call from Robert Downey Jr., however, that Evans would change his mind.
“Maybe the thing you’re most scared of is actually the thing you should do,” Evans thought at the time.
Even after accepting the offer, there was a shred of hope on the actor’s part that his movies might’ve tanked.
“One of my biggest fears was that the movies were going to be good,” he said. “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, all-encompassing.”
