“Nope, nope, nope”: the controversial movie Chris Evans bombed his audition for
Now closely associated with his role as Steve Rogers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Chris Evans spent many years waiting for Hollywood to cast him correctly.
Although he had shown comedic chops, the only roles that were offered to him were in not-so-great films like the spoof Not Another Teen Movie and What’s Your Number?, and while he did manage to work with great directors like Edgar Wright on Scott Pilgrim vs The World and Danny Boyle on Sunshine, neither film performed at the box office, leaving him in a lurch.
More often, it’s one role that helps an actor shoot into the stratosphere of popularity, and for this, Evans had his sights on one that couldn’t have been more different from Captain America, which brought him his eventual mainstream success, vying for a part in The Dreamers.
Legendary filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, who directed classics like The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, was mounting a comeback with the ambitious The Dreamers, a highly controversial film that revolved around an erotic triangle formed between students studying in Paris during the riots of the late 1960s, and given the reputation that Bertolucci had, it’s not hard to see why he entered his audition with such trepidation, completely embarrassing himself when it came to reading for the role.
“I had a horrible experience at that audition, he recalled, “It was early 2000s and it was the movie that everybody wanted. I went and had to audition. I sat in this audition room, waiting with like 15 other guys for hours. I finally walk in the room, I open the door, and the casting director looked up, and he was like, ‘Nope. Nope, nope, nope’. I was like, ‘Oh, Jesus’.”
Given that it must have been tough to lose out on a role that ended up attracting so much attention, that he is able to have such a sense of humour about the incident is impressive, with the film finally starring Eva Green, Michael Pitt, and Louis Garrel, all of whom went on to have significant careers in the immediate future, and since Bertolucci passed away in 2018, Evans never got the opportunity to work with him later.
Although it may have been a crushing blow to Evans at the time, The Dreamers certainly would have taken his career in a very different direction. The film attracted a significant amount of notoriety for how sexually explicit it was, with some detractors calling it out for being exploitative. While Green had an instant road to success when she was cast to play Vesper Lyn in Casino Royale, it took slightly longer for Pitt and Garrel to find their footing.
Evans’ career ended up taking a different shape because he would become most renowned for his performance as Johnny Storm, the superhero known as The Human Torch, in 2005’s Fantastic Four and its 2007 sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and while neither film was particularly well-received, the actor was listed as a standout because of how well he understood the source material.
It was only shortly after any plans for a third Fantastic Four film were cancelled that he landed the titular role in Captain America: The First Avenger, which he has continued to this day, wherein, although it was briefly expected that he might retire from the part, he will next be seen playing Rogers in Avengers: Doomsday.
