Chris Evans covers the October issue of GQ, mostly to promote Pain Hustlers, but this also serves as some kind of career retrospective. From the looks of things, Chris will be working a lot less going forward. He wants to be in Boston with Alba and his family, and he’s past the point where he wants to live his life on months-long location shoots. I haven’t read a long interview with Chris in a few years, and he’s pretty much the same as I remember – slightly neurotic and hyper-self-aware. But he also seems to have found his peace and his bliss. Some highlights from this GQ piece:

Life just outside of Boston: It “takes me back to a place when life was not just simpler—that’s too reductive—but to a time where I was more pure, I guess; where my ego and my insecurities weren’t such a dominant force that I had to push against.” At his house just outside Boston, Evans says, “I really take my time…I can’t believe I’m 42.”

He’s not a movie star: “There are some people that you meet and you just think, Man, that’s a movie star,” he says. He is adamant that he is not one of them. “I love to act. But it’s not something that I couldn’t live without.”

Seasons & trees: In Massachusetts, he says, he pays close attention to the passing of the seasons. He will literally marvel at a flower. “The fact that trees are green blows my mind,” Evans says…mostly, these days, he marvels at the universe as a defense mechanism. “I’ve just learned early on that when I go small, I suffer. When I look at my own life and it’s under a microscope, or when I consider my own experience, it leads to cyclical unhappiness.”

His dog Dodger: “What he’s not thinking about is yesterday. What he’s not worried about is tomorrow. He’s actively engaging in the moment in this really, really clean way. And this all feels a little basic, but he’s a little teacher, isn’t he? He’s like a little example of what we should be doing. And he’s just so honest, so pure, so good. He has no idea that I’m famous. He has no idea. And he can’t know, which is like this, it’s like an airtight thing. I mean, he’s famous and he’ll never know. He can’t, it’s like an impenetrable character trait. He can’t be corrupted.”

A Gemini: “It’s funny. I’ve been told that I’m an extrovert. Even though I think we all kind of feel like introverts to some degree. I’m a pretty open person. I like communication. I’m not sure how much I believe in astrology, but I’m a Gemini and I’ve had enough ex–girlfriends tell me, ‘You’re such a Gemini.’ And one of the qualities of Geminis is communication. We like to share and converse and just be candid. I, kind of to a fault, will dump my brain out unapologetically. Sometimes whether I’m asked to or not. But that type of emotional sharing often comes with physicality that I’m comfortable in, you know, body language and cadence. There’s a commonality to that character type”—meaning, the abrasive guy, I gather—“that I think I feel comfortable with.”

Why he took the role of Captain America: So he said no a few times before he said yes. Negotiated down the commitment, in terms of how many movies he was going to owe Marvel. Weighed the positive and the negative—“the pros were that I’d be able to take care of my family forever; the cons were that I would become deeply, deeply unhappy with fame and loss of control”—and then, in the end, put on the suit and became the man. Looking back on it now, Evans says, he mostly just feels gratitude. He did not in the end lose control, or become deeply unhappy. “I love playing that role,” he says. “I feel connected to it in a way that when you revisit a character so many times you can’t help but try to absorb some of their traits and measure yourself against them.”

He wants to work less as an actor: These days, when presented with a new project, Chris Evans might look out the window of his house before deciding whether to do it. “Now it’s really about, well: What time of year are we filming? Am I gonna miss autumn? You know, I don’t want to miss autumn. I only have so many of them.”

He’s got other interests. “I could just make furniture for nobody and be happy… I don’t want to—I’ve got to frame this the right way. I was going to say, I don’t want to waste too much time in this industry, but that doesn’t really feel.… That doesn’t sound correct. I don’t want to occupy too much space in an industry that I’ve already poured 20 years into. Sometimes I wonder if I’m lacking some sort of—like, I think I’m a very driven person. I have a lot of energy. I wake up early, I get a lot done in a day, but it’s not always focused on acting. Sometimes reading a script is the last thing I want to do.”

He has not been on a movie set in 2023. “I haven’t worked all year and I don’t plan to, which has been lovely.” Last year, he worked nonstop on three different movies, an accident of scheduling that he regrets. “My girlfriend that I’ve had for a while, when we began dating”—a couple months after we spoke, Evans and his girlfriend, Alba Baptista, got married—“I was like: ‘Yeah, I do one movie a year. I try to never work now.’ And then, after like a few months of dating, boom, guess what? We’re living in Atlanta for a year. Get ready. And even when that year was happening, I was like, man, never again.”

Whether he’d ever go back to Marvel. “Yeah, maybe. I’ll never say never, just because it was such a wonderful experience. But I’m also very precious with it. It’s something that I am very proud of. And like I said, sometimes I can’t believe it even happened. And I wouldn’t want the black eye if it felt like a cash grab or if it didn’t live up to expectations or if it just felt like it wasn’t connected to that original thing. So, no time soon. And ultimately I really hope to just maybe act a little bit less in my life. I have a lot of other interests. Look, by no means have I climbed any sort of a mountain in this field. I have no Oscars and I’m not lumped with other names that are at the top of the mountain in any way. But I also feel very satisfied.”

[From GQ]

He also expresses an interest in what Seth Rogen is doing, getting high and making ceramics (which is true, although Seth still has a production company too). Basically, all of these words come down to the fact that Chris is sort of burned out on Hollywood and he really just wants to spend the rest of his life in Massachusetts with Alba and probably a couple of kids. It’s not some kind of rebrand – this is who he is, a man in his 40s who figured out the priorities for the rest of his life. In another era, Chris would have been a leading man and he would be booked in back-to-back leading-man projects throughout his 40s. But that Hollywood doesn’t exist anymore, and so Chris is sort of making the right choice.

Cover & IG courtesy of GQ.