Chris Evans

In Avengers: Endgame (2019), Chris Evans makes Steve Rogers worth listening to when the conversation turns to carrying on. He gives those exchanges a steadiness that the film needs, without making Rogers dull. Robert Downey Jr. supplies the humour and the tiredness; Evans does not have to compete with either to matter. We rate this ability to keep a decent man interesting, though the writing has to give him more than decency to play.

The early route ran through teen films and Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four (2005). Steve Rogers, introduced in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), became the defining part. Yet Snowpiercer (2013) and Knives Out (2019) also took him into a dystopian thriller and an ensemble mystery respectively. There is no need to treat each departure from the superhero films as a reinvention.

Jake Kasdan's Red One (2024) puts him to work as a man who has let people down and knows it. Evans gets the few laughs as tracker Jack O'Malley, but Dwayne Johnson gives him little to bounce off. Johnson's fixed disapproval makes their pairing hard work, and Evans cannot supply the embarrassment for both of them. His scenes with Mary Elizabeth Ellis and Wesley Kimmel briefly suggest a life beyond the assignment. There is a comic actor here willing to make himself look bad, in a partnership that leaves him doing too much of the work.

Materialists (2025) shows both the value and the limits of casting him as someone decent. For Celine Song, he plays John, an actor whose lack of money has cost him, gently and well. But John has too little to do beyond being poor and kind, and Evans and Dakota Johnson are pleasant together where the film needs evidence of a difficult shared past. We were frustrated by their scenes together: nothing suggested the couple who had once torn each other apart over a restaurant bill. For his next romance, we would like to see him given more chances to be difficult.