Chris Evans

Chris Evans has built a screen career around an unusually useful contrast: he can look completely at home in the center of a blockbuster while still suggesting that the person beneath the confidence is less certain than he appears. Born in Boston on June 13, 1981, and raised in nearby Sudbury, Evans developed an early interest in musical theater, attended acting camp and later took classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. His early work moved through television, teen comedy and action, including Opposite Sex, Not Another Teen Movie, The Perfect Score and Cellular. His first major comic-book role came as the cocky Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Around that period, Sunshine offered a more restrained showcase, while Scott Pilgrim vs. the World put his comic timing to good use as swaggering action star Lucas Lee. Evans became most widely associated with Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger, beginning a run that continued through two Captain America sequels and the Avengers films. His approach gave the character steadiness without making him stiff: Rogers could be principled, physically formidable and visibly out of step with the world around him. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was Evans’s favorite Marvel film, in part because he felt he was beginning to understand the character. The roles beyond that franchise show a performer willing to disrupt his clean-cut leading-man image. He played a desperate revolutionary in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, a real-life lawyer struggling with addiction in Puncture and a gleefully unpleasant suspect in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out. Gifted drew on his warmth in a smaller family drama, while Defending Jacob placed him inside a darker story of parental fear and uncertainty. Evans made his directing debut with Before We Go, a romantic comedy in which he also starred. He has also worked in voice acting, including TMNT, Lightyear and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, and made his Broadway debut in Lobby Hero. Across comedy, thrillers, drama and superhero spectacle, his best work tends to come from testing the certainty that his screen presence initially seems to promise.