Chris Evans has revealed the unusual pitch behind his role in 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The movie, which is based on the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, stars Michael Cera in the title role as a slacker bass player who falls in love with the mysterious Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and finds out he must battle her seven evil exes. One of these exes is the self-obsessed movie star Lucas Lee (Chris Evans), who Scott battles along with his team of stunt doubles.
GQ recently shared a video interview with Chris Evans that was conducted before the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike where the star broke down some of his most iconic roles leading up to his new movie Pain Hustlers.
Evans shared that the pitch for the movie was somewhat insulting, as the character was described as someone who “he thinks he’s great and he’s actually terrible.” When he was told “you’d be perfect,” Evans didn’t quite know what to make of that. Read Evans’ full story below:
The pitch for Scott Pilgrim was so strange… He kind of said “Lucas Lee is this movie star, but he really doesn’t have much range… He thinks he’s great and he’s actually terrible, and I think you’d be perfect.”And I said “OK…”
Chris Evans’ Early Career Predicted His Future Superstardom
Although Chris Evans had been holding lead roles in movies for about a decade at the point that he appeared in Scott Pilgrim, he wouldn’t become a bona fide superstar like Lucas Lee until the following year. In 2011, he made his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut as the titular hero of Captain America: The First Avenger. He would go on to appear as Captain America in more than a half dozen additional Marvel blockbusters.
However, before any of this happened, movies had long been predicting his ability to become a huge movie star. This came as early as 2001, when he starred as Jake Wyler in the 2001 parody Not Another Teen Movie. Although he was a relative unknown at the time, he was already being asked to fill in the shoes of the teen stars he was parodying, namely Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You and Freddie Prinze Jr. in She’s All That.
Evans had already starred in Fantastic Four, Cellular, and Push before joining the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World cast. However, while he was a rising star, he was still far from the ubiquitous fame of his character Lucas Lee. After the release of Scott Pilgrim, it would only be a matter of months until he actually was, proving just how forward-thinking his casting was for the iconic cult movie.
