The movie Chris Evans has memorised: “Not what high-brow society will deem a quality film”
Have you ever heard of the “Hollywood Chris”? It might sound like a painful yoga pose or possibly some kind of burger, but in fact, it references the four actors who all have the same first name and have, in all likelihood, appeared in essentially every single film you’ve watched over the past 15 years or so.
Those Chrises are Pratt, Evans, Hemsworth and Pine—and it’s the Evans flavour that we’ll be discussing in today’s lesson. Chris Evans (alongside Hemsworth) is the Marvel Avenger whose films have grossed a staggering $11.4 billion in total, putting him right up there with the likes of Tom Cruise and Will Smith. And yet you might not look twice if he strolled past you on the street on the way to Greggs.
The Boston-native had a quiet start to his acting career, popping up in such dirge as Not Another Teen Movie and the mopey junkie flick London with Jessica Biel, before he managed to land his first part in the world of Marvel, albeit in 2005’s inexplicably popular Fantastic Four. Thanks to a decent performance at the box office and Evans generally being praised for the work he put in, he also popped up as the Human Torch in the sequel, a couple of years later, named Rise of the Silver Surfer.
He then spent the next few years showing off a fair amount of versatility by taking on parts in films as varied as Danny Boyle’s Sunshine and rich-people-in-New-York-nonsense The Nanny Diaries, but a really sizeable movie seemed to evade him.
That all changed in 2010, however, when Evans won a multi-movie deal to become Captain America in the revamped Marvel Cinematic Universe. Over the next decade, every superhero film he appeared in did insane numbers at the box office and made him an indispensable part of Marvel folklore. Since that came to an end with Avengers: Endgame, things haven’t been as smooth sailing, and he has appeared in a string of what can only be described as stinkers, including Christmas catastrophe Red One, Ghosted on Apple TV+, and Netflix’s Pain Hustlers. He was good in Knives Out, though, so we’ll give him that.
When it comes to Evans’ own favourite movies, perhaps unsurprisingly he also tends to sway toward crowd-pleasers, as proved when he was put on the spot by Letterboxd to name his top four films of all time alongside Dakota Johnson during promotions for 2025’s Materialists, saying: “Jesus this is hard. It’s so dependent on mood”.
Tempted to go ‘art-house’ with his choices to prove his taste, he instead felt bad about going big, saying, “I want to put Pulp Fiction and Jurassic Park in there and ET, but I can’t, I can’t. They’re all kind of in two in the same [category] you know what I mean? I really like Legends of the Fall. I’m gonna chuck in The Goonies too.”
Seemingly unaware that you can’t pick more than four films for Letterboxd’s popular red-carpet ambush, he also went with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but there was one additional movie that Evans also insisted on including, mainly because he genuinely believes he knows every single line off by heart. And that was a 1993 cowboy classic starring Val Kilmer, Kurt Russell and Bill Paxton.
“Ooh, you know what else I’m gonna throw in, this is not what highbrow society will deem quality film, but Tombstone. Tombstone is one of the few movies that I could probably perform it right now from beginning to end,” he gushed.
Despite being egged on by an amused Johnson to do exactly that, Evans politely declined. No doubt because nobody in an interview situation has time to watch one man recite a two-hour-and-14-minute western in its entirety. Also, look out for Dakota Johnson’s wink to the interviewer at 22 seconds. No idea why she does it, but wow.
