Chris Evans on Tom Brady: 'I really hope he's not a Trump supporter'
Chris Evans is no longer giving Tom Brady a pass when it comes to politics.
The actor, who plays Captain America and can next be seen Avengers: Endgame, previously said he overlooked the political beliefs of his home state hero New England Patriots QB Tom Brady because he didn’t want to “encourage this landscape of if you disagree with me politically, you’re my enemy.” After all, Brady “gave me five rings.” (Now six.) However, in a new interview, Evans makes it clear he feels differently now.
Asked if he would ever play Brady — who goes way back with Trump and infamously had a “Make America Great Again” hat in his locker ahead of the 2016 election — in a biopic, Evans told the Hollywood Reporter, “I don’t know,” before adding, “I really hope he’s not a Trump supporter. I’m just hoping he’s one of those guys that maybe supported him and now regrets it. Maybe he thought it was going to be different — and even that bothers me — but maybe there’s a chance now he just thinks Trump’s an absolute dumb sh**, which he is. If he doesn’t, if he’s still on that Trump train, I might have to cut ties. It’s really tough.”
Evans, who has long been a political force on Twitter and often takes the Trump administration to task, continued, “I think maybe a couple of years ago I might have tried to pull some, like, mental gymnastics to compartmentalize, but I don’t know if I can anymore. So I’m just hoping he’s woken up.”
Evans is well aware that not everyone agrees with him politically, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be quiet. “You don’t want to alienate half your audience,” he admitted, but added, “I’d be disappointed in myself if I didn’t speak up. Especially for fear of some monetary repercussion or career damage — that just feels really gross to me.” And he said he’s received nothing but support from Marvel for expressing his views with studio president Kevin Feige saying, “I don’t see it as trash-talking. I see it as very astute, very honorable, very noble, very Cap-like.”
In fact, he’s only getting deeper into it. He was recently visiting Congress and THR notes it’s because he was conducting interviews for an upcoming website called A Starting Point. He’s one of the founders for the project, which touts itself as helping to “create informed, responsible and empathetic citizens.”
A post shared by Hollywood Reporter (@hollywoodreporter) on Mar 27, 2019 at 6:00am PDT
The THR interview touched on a lot of other topics, including how he’s going to back away from acting to direct. However, he noted that he “never said the word ‘retire'” and added that he finds it “obnoxious” when other actors do. Acting is “not something you retire from.”
Evans also touched on relationships — of course, a recent on-off one he had with comedian Jenny Slate drew a lot of attention. “I was always a really autonomous guy my whole life,” he admitted. “Camping by myself is one of my favorite things. I really like to be with someone who also has their own thing to do as well, you know? If I’m with someone who just kind of adopts my life, that can feel a bit suffocating.”
And he also said he’s grown out of an early weed habit he had during his early days in Hollywood. “I used to love it,” he said of marijuana, “but now I think it’s the one thing that gets in my way. It zaps your motivation. I think apathy kind of bleeds in, and you start to think, ‘Well, I’m not apathetic, I just don’t feel like doing that.’ And it’s like, no — you would feel like doing that if you weren’t stoned. And, you know — I’m 37. I can’t be smoking weed all the time. That’s crazy.”
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