Strip away the super-soldier serum and the star-spangled tights, and the story of Steve Rogers, as told in the comics and the recent Marvel films with Chris Evans, including this weekend's Avengers: Age of Ultron, is one about a man given an opportunity to change his life. It is a story about a man with gifts, both unrealized and undiscovered, who comes to actualize his potential and become something more. Something great.
This is not just the story of Steve Rogers. It is also the story of actor Chris Evans becoming Captain America.
Before Chris Evans picked up the super-soldier's shield, he was a talent with untapped potential of his own. With turns in The Perfect Score, Fantastic Four, The Losers, and The Nanny Diaries, there was undoubtedly something very watchable about Evans. His all-American, high-school-quarterback looks, his class-clown knack for smart-assery, and his sincere charm, made the actor immensely likable onscreen.
But while he had talent, Evans wasn't exactly exceptional. Part of that is that his given virtues made him somewhat indistinguishable from a particular class of actors: Ryan Reynolds-like hunky smart-alecks who tended to be defaulted to roles as rom-com love interests, or the wise-cracking comic relief in action movies. It didn't help that Evans' attempts at serious roles (London, Street Kings, Puncture, or Sunshine) tended to be dramatically unconvincing—and tended to go unwatched at the box office. His performances often felt more as if he was playing at emotions, not actually embodying them. You looked into his eyes—where so much of powerful acting is conveyed—and you could only see Evans trying to be someone. Not actually being them.
It's not that it wasn't possible Evans might show us more one day. It just seemed hard to tell when Evans would find a role, and a groove, that would realize whatever gifts we had yet to see. If, frankly, those gifts were there at all.
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Then Captain America came along.
Just as sickly Steve Rogers was given a chance to become the best version of himself in Captain America: The First Avenger, so too was Chris Evans. When Evans put on the red, white, and blue outfit, he realized what we had been waiting to see. It's not just that it's a role that deviates from his past ones. It brings out the best in him. Now he, and the Captain America movies, have become the consistent high points of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Avengers: Age of Ultron is no exception. When you look in Evans' eyes now, you see him being Captain America, not trying to be. There's genuine emotion there when required (say, when he's bedside with the dementia-suffering love of his life), as is intelligence (in action mode he has the constantly roaming eyes of a military tactician).
He also embodies Cap in a more literal sense: his physical bulk. But the more impressive accomplishment is that instead of using his physique as a shortcut to onscreen presence, he fills that formidable figure with an almost physical weight of authority. An authority that tends to evoke a kind of patriarchal, Father Knows Best quality, and a compatible tone that Evans continually manages to summon from his car hood-sized chest—despite the actor only being 33 years old. (He brought a similar ahead-of-his-years gravitas to his lead turn in last year's beloved international action movie Snowpiercer.) It's always there, whether Cap is chastising his teammates for language, improvising and assigning orders, or offering ideological lectures like "This isn't freedom. This is fear" in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, or "Every time someone tries to end a war before it starts, innocent lives die" in The Avengers: Age of Ultron.
It is, however, not just Captain America's fatherly sternness that Evans performs so well. It can be difficult to get the tone of Cap right, because he's both military bravado and Boy Scout innocence; gruff tactical efficiency and Atticus Finch empathy. But Evans nails the warmth of Cap with the same timbre of sincerity and conviction. (I swear he drops his voice an octave for this role to achieve that.) That element of the role offers a natural fit for Evans' abilities. His knack for boyish humor and charm are perfect for Captain America's old-fashioned good-naturedness and the lingering insecurity of a former 98-lb weakling. He's as believable nervously asking his neighbor out as he is gently ribbing his brothers-in-arms, or doling out mid-battle gallows humor. Chris Evans' Captain America is, in other words, a role that may fluctuate in tone, but never wavers in its performance. Like Rogers, Evans brings his innate gifts to his newly acquired ones.
There's a great scene in The Winter Soldier where Captain America knows he's about to be attacked by 20 men in a moving elevator, and says, "Before we get started, does anyone want to get out?" Evans performs it convincingly with equal amounts of mild boyish glee, amused lightness, matter-of-fact resignation, chutzpah, and confident menace. It's a wonderful moment, in no small part because you realize just how much fun it's become to watch Chris Evans excel at playing (and growing with) this character. It's one of many moments in a Marvel movie that makes you realize there really was greatness in Chris Evans. Just like Steve Rogers, all it took was Captain America to draw it out.
