With a couple of months left before Captain America: The First Avenger hits on July 22nd, the marketing side is slowly taking shape, though focus is more on Thor at this point. One of the more interesting pieces to come out of an interview is from this new piece with USA Weekend where they get Chris Evans to talk about the the film, a couple of parts of which have been excerpted so far. It is interesting to think of the changes for the character as when he was first introduced in comics, twenty years passed for him since the end of World War II and now the same concept is used but it’s sixty-five years of difference to a very, very different world, making the adjustment all that much more interesting.
In the Marvel comics, Cap is a guy who went from the 1940s to modern times when he’s found encased in ice by the Avengers. Assuming part of that will be in The Avengers movie, your Cap will have to live in a world that’s very different from what he’s used to.
Yeah, at least there’s some meat on the bone. You want to play a character that has conflict – that’s what makes a character appealing to an actor, getting to find an arc and a reason, something to chew on. And that’s a lot. If you woke up one day and it was 50, 60 years in the future and everyone you knew had passed away and the entire world around you is different — you don’t have a friend, you don’t know anybody, you don’t know anything — that’d be a lot to take in. It’s exciting as an actor to try and tackle that.
What’s this I hear about a “Captain America song”?
There is a Captain America song, but I don’t sing it. Initially in the film, when he becomes Captain America, long story short the serum is destroyed and they can’t reproduce the experiment so I’m the only super soldier there is. The U.S. government won’t allow me to go to war because it’s too risky and they can’t afford to lose me, but they use me as a propaganda tool and they send me on a USO Tour. So there’s a whole Captain America song, and they try to make him a little bit of a celebrity to try and sell bonds. There is a Captain America song, and there was a week of shooting, and I had that song in my head. I couldn’t stop humming it! It was so annoying. But it’s a funny sequence actually.
