Chris Evans: American Marvel | GQ

“Chris Evans pecs. how do they FEEL? like smooth stone from the souvenir shop?”

…is the instant message that pops up on my computer one Monday morning in April. My friend Kyle follows it up with a link to the gossip pages of the New York Daily News: I am being described as the “mystery maiden” Evans introduced to his mother at a premiere party; we held hands, the paper is reporting, “in a flirty manner,” and he even placed “one of them on his chest.” Oh.

When I started working on this profile, I decided on a “say yes to everything, try to be cool” approach, with the idea that maybe I’d capture something real about the star of Captain America: The First Avenger—or as “real” as could be hoped for/faked in the time we had together. But in the days since my first interview with Chris Evans, I’d drunk myself under the table, snuck out of his house at five thirty in the morning, bummed a ride home off a transsexual, been teased mercilessly in front of his mother, and now—this bit in the paper.

I don’t remember touching his chest, which is too bad.

Let me start with our official interview, which was a little bit professional and somewhat dignified. Chris Evans arrived on time at Sonny McLean’s, an Irish pub in Santa Monica chosen for no real reason other than we’re both from Boston, and Boston has lots of Irish bars. He showed up in aviators, a red T-shirt, and a backward baseball cap pulled down to his eyebrows. “How aggressive can I be?” Chris grinned. “Shots?” It turned out the bar was beer-and-wine-only, though, so he got a Sam Adams in a liter-sized stein that he said made him “feel like a Viking.” I got the first of many white wines.

That night was his last “normal” Saturday night in Los Angeles. Normal in the sense that in a few days he was flying to Albuquerque for preproduction work on The Avengers (in which Evans will join a superhero supergroup that includes Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk). And normal in the sense that he was about to go from being halfway famous but able to walk his bulldog in peace to being a household name—or if not an entire-household name, then at least a household’s-teenage-sons name. He was having a good-bye party later on and spent the interview working himself up for the festivities.

Chris Evans is 30 years old and handsome in a familiar way—sort of like if the best-looking guy you went to high school with took really good care of himself after graduation. His teeth aren’t off-puttingly white; his clothes aren’t particularly stylish. His face is a lot friendlier, toothier, smileyer in person than it is in, say, the smoldery/serious billboards of him and Evan Rachel Wood for Gucci’s new Guilty fragrance. Also, and his mother will kill me for saying this, but although on-screen he’s titanic, in person he’s a normal six feet and takes up a normal-human amount of space. His mom, Lisa, who has a weakness for skimming Internet message boards, said, “Somebody wrote on IMDb that he looked short! And I was like, ‘He was standing next to [Thor star] Chris Hemsworth—of course he looked short! Shaquille O’Neal would look short!’ Sometimes I get worked up, because I don’t want anybody to say anything bad about my child, so I’ll call him and say, ‘Somebody said you look short!’ and he’ll say, ‘Mom, you’ve gotta stop that, you’ve gotta stop.’ So I’ve pretty much stopped.” Chris, later, laughing: “She hasn’t stopped shit!”