Chris Evans Was Very Adamant About One Thing When It Came To Captain America
I'm going to need you to remember back to the very early days of the MCU. Robert Downey Jr. was Tony Stark, played with all the snark and charisma you could ever want from a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist character, and Edward Norton was the tortured Bruce Banner, a role he wasn't destined to hold on to.
A "Captain America" movie was coming up and ... well, people had opinions. Some wanted a grounded Cap, some wanted a badass Cap, and some wanted something more in line with RDJ's Tony Stark. The thing is, we had never gotten a good Captain America on screen before. We'd gotten one terrible "Captain America" film in 1990 from schlockmeister Albert Pyun ("Cyborg" and "The Sword and the Sorcerer"), and the character had pretty much fallen out of favor to all but the most die-hard Marvel comics fans.
He was too Goodie Two Shoes, at least that was the perception, so that's probably why a lot of fandom was trying to figure out how Marvel was going to make him interesting in a world established with a character like Tony Stark.
Chris Evans didn't have any doubt about how Steve Rogers was to be played, though. In fact, he insisted that the only way Rogers works is if he was 100% earnest. And not only that, but he had to have been that way from the very beginning.
Less jokes, more heart
Evans truly understood that Steve Rogers was Captain America long before he took the Super Soldier Serum and he made the request to "Captain American: The First Avenger" screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely to underline that point in Rogers' origin story. Markus revealed this in a 2021 interview with Yahoo:
"He was very conscious of not wanting snark. It was a very good understanding of Captain America, which is that if this guy's going to fly as a character and as an authority figure, eventually, he's got to have the gravity right away, no matter what the situation. Which is what we all came to realize, that Steve Rogers was born Captain America, he just didn't have the body for it. And Evans got that. I think he may have taken a joke or two out is what I remember."
It's very possible there was another reason for Evans wanting to tone down the snark and that was to differentiate Rogers from his previous comic book roles. Yes, everyone remembers his Johnny Storm from the Fox "Fantastic Four" films, but he was also in the comic adaptation "The Losers," in which he played another jokester smart aleck.
So, his instincts as a performer and creative were right on the money, and the boy scout version of Captain America ended up not only working, but becoming the heart of "The Infinity Saga." Good job, Cap!