Chris Evans opens up about how his acting career became ‘unhealthy’
Topics: Celebrity, Chris Evans, Film and TV, Captain America
Jess Hardiman
Featured Image Credit: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic/Getty/Marvel Studios
Topics: Celebrity, Chris Evans, Film and TV, Captain America
You'd have thought Chris Evans has one of the best jobs in the world, having starred in the second highest grossing movie of all time and receiving adoration from fans for his portrayal of Captain America. However, his career is apparently not as rosy as it seems.
Evans, 42, became one of Hollywood’s biggest names after signing a multi-film deal with Marvel back in 2010.
The contract would see him feature as Captain America in no fewer than seven films across the character’s three-part movie series, and franchises like the Avengers and Spider-Man flicks, meaning the star was rarely out of the blockbuster scene for almost 10 years.
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His final turn as Steve Rogers came in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, which Evans telling Men's Journal that his final stint on set was understandably emotional.
"It felt like graduating high school or college, you know," he said.
"For the last month of filming I was letting myself go to work every day and be a little overwhelmed and a little nostalgic and grateful.
“By the last day, I was bawling. I cry pretty easy, but I was definitely bawling."
Fast forward to 2023, and it seems Evans’ pace has very much changed.
In a new interview with GQ, he revealed he’s not even been on a movie set this year, with his last role to air being Apple TV’s Ghosted, which debuted back in April.
Beyond that, he has films Red One and Pain Hustlers due for release at some point in 2023, and are currently in post-production, along with Netflix series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, which lands in November.
But Evans has already done his bit, meaning he can sit back for now.
“I haven’t worked all year and I don’t plan to, which has been lovely,” he said.
Last year was a different picture, as he was working non-stop on three different movies – a fluke in scheduling that he now regrets.
Speaking about his relationship with his then-girlfriend and now-wife Alba Baptista, Evans said: “When we began dating […] I was like: ‘Yeah, I do one movie a year. I try to never work now.’
"And then, after like a few months of dating, boom, guess what? We’re living in Atlanta for a year. Get ready. And even when that year was happening, I was like, man, never again.”
He said he enjoyed making those three movies, but it was an exhausting process.
Evans explained how ‘as much as you try to keep the experience of making a film in a vacuum and isolate it from all the kind of egoic narrative that wants to break through’ and just try to ‘create and be emotionally accessible and vulnerable and take risks’, you can’t help but ‘be aware of yourself’.
He continued: “And as a result, there is a little egoic voice in your head that is aware of your past, that is measuring your future. It’s considering the story of yourself, which I think is fundamentally unhealthy and, for me, starts to erode some of my joy.”
When asked if he can ‘reconstruct the logic' that ‘led him to doing each of the movies he did’, Evans said Ghosted felt like a movie that he ‘grew up on, a movie that maybe we don’t see very much anymore’, while Pain Hustlers was a no-brainer as a ‘really fun role’.
“And then Red One: I’ve just been looking for a Christmas movie my whole career,” he added with a grin.