The 2021 movie Chris Evans wanted “so badly” to be in: “It’s so hard to hear”
Chris Evans hasn’t been shy about his musical aspirations.
The actor struck gold when he was cast as Steve Rogers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as he had been surviving a fairly rough career with no shortage of misfires up until then. Although Evans’ casting as Captain America is one of the most perfect in the history of superhero cinema, he’s shown that he has a range that extends beyond the MCU.
Between playing a dangerous black sheep in Knives Out, a disturbed revolutionary in Snowpiercer, a comically self-obsessed actor in Scott Pilgrim vs The World, and a criminal in The Iceman, Evans has shown that he is an actor who can do it all. The issue is that, in the aftermath of the titanic release of Avengers: Endgame, Evans’ career has begun to fizzle out. He’s appeared in lazy streaming films like The Gray Man, Red One, and Ghosted, all of which fail to take advantage of his charisma.
He’s also tried to take chances on auteur projects that didn’t go the way he might have expected. He’s not bad in Materialists, but the script for Celine Song’s follow-up to Past Lives is too tonally inconsistent for the film to work overall. Similarly, Evans swung for the fences with Honey Don’t!, a film that failed due to the lack of effort put in by its filmmakers. Even Sacrifice, the drama that he starred alongside Anya Taylor-Joy, bombed at fall festivals before being picked up by Netflix, who has yet to give it a release date.
While Evans will hopefully continue to take chances, even though this winter’s Avengers: Doomsday will bring him back into the MCU, he does have a secret weapon with his ability to sing. Although he’s yet to star in a major musical, the actor said he’s made it no secret that he wants to be in one.
“I want to do a musical so badly, man,” Evans admitted candidly, “Someone told me they’re [remaking] Little Shop of Horrors and I was like, ‘Oh, can I be down? Please? Can I be the dentist?’”
He also lobbied hard to be cast in a musical project that ended up being one of the best films of the 2020s so far, recalling, “When I first came out here, early 2000s, there were rumblings about [Steven] Spielberg maybe doing West Side Story. That’s one of my favourite musicals. I did it when I was in high school, and obviously, he’s doing it now, and I called my team, and they were like, ‘Chris, maybe Krupke. You can’t. You’re too old’. It’s so hard to hear.”
While Evans might have been perfectly suited for the role of Tony in West Side Story had it been made two decades prior, he sadly aged out of being right for the role in Spielberg’s remake, which was released in 2021. The role of Officer Krupke might have been interesting for him to take on, but it is likely that the director wanted to avoid casting someone so famous for what was arguably a smaller part.
There’s certainly been an uptick in the popularity of cinematic musicals with Wicked, La La Land, and The Greatest Showman, so hopefully Evans will eventually have an opportunity to star in one. Given how obsessed Hollywood is with remakes, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before there are new versions of Oklahoma, South Pacific, and The Phantom of the Opera.
