In 2011, Chris Evans stepped into the red, white, and blue suit to play super-soldier Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger. And while that suit changed over the next eight years, the actor in the role remained the same as the Marvel Cinematic Universe expanded. It had seemed that 2019's Avengers: Endgame would be the last we saw of Evans as Cap, but new reports surfaced on Jan. 14 that the 39-year-old actor may be suiting up again for a future Marvel project. (True, Evans seemed to deny the rumors with a tweet that reads, "News to me," but hey, we can dream.) Anyway, a lot can change over time—not only did Evans bid the character farewell in a 2018 tweet, he wasn't even sure he wanted to play him in the first place. As MCU fans gear up for his possible return, let's look back on the time Chris Evans explained why he originally said no to playing Captain America.
Ahead of the release of The First Avenger in 2011, Evans spoke to the AP about his reticence to take such a potentially high-profile job.
"I'm a big fan of my privacy, my anonymity," he said. "You know, I've made films for a while, like I said, but it's always been a one-shot deal. A film like this, if it explodes, you don't have the opportunity to kind of get your footing again. You have to dive back into a sequel. And that's intimidating, and you're compromising a bit of the freedom you really enjoy."
As Evans predicted, he spent the following eight years of his life playing Steve in four Avengers movies, two Captain America sequels, a Spider-Man movie, Captain Marvel, and Ant-Man. And he did go from being a working actor who probably wasn't recognized every single time he walked down the street to being one of the most famous faces of his generation.
Even back then, at the start of his run as Captain America, the prospect didn't seem very attractive to him.
"You can't turn off celebrity. Once you hit it, there's no rewind," Evans continued in the 2011 interview. "I've been lucky enough to have been around people who are much further down the celebrity road than I am, and you see what it means to be constantly bombarded as a celebrity. And it's always. It's not just sometime, it's all the time, and that's a tricky pill to swallow."
Over the years, the actor has opened up about struggling with anxiety as a public figure. And on a 2020 episode of a Hollywood Reporter podcast, Evans shed more light on the specific mental health issues he was dealing with at the time he turned down Marvel's initial offer.
"It was the first time I started having mini panic attacks on set," Evans said of filming the 2010 movie Puncture. "I really started to think, 'I'm not sure if this [acting] is the right thing for me, I'm not sure if I'm feeling as healthy as I should be feeling.'"
He looked to people he trusted to help him decide about whether or not to accept the Captain America role, from his therapist to Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr. Of course, he took the gig, and the rest is comic book movie history. In the same podcast, Evans said it was "the best decision [he] ever made" and that (despite being right about that whole becoming hugely famous thing) "all the things that I was fearing never really came to fruition."
And if you can't get enough of this star, See 16-Year-Old Chris Evans in His First Acting Role.
Read the original article on Best Life.
