Succession’s Jeremy Strong was almost a body double for Chris Evans’s Captain America
Jeremy Strong found out the hard way that there are no bit roles, only bit players. According to the Times U.K., the intense Emmy winner was offered the role of Steve Rogers’ more petite, scrawnier physique in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) before Rogers injected a serum and transformed into the ripped, muscular Captain America.
According to Strong, the real Captain America’s visage will be digitally grafted onto Strong’s torso. ‘They told me there was a top-secret film about Captain America,’ Strong revealed to the Times. They required an actor to portray Captain America in his youth, before his metahuman transformation.
They said they required a transformative actor because they planned to utilize computer-generated imagery to superimpose the actual actor’s face and voice over mine. Chris Evans, a high school friend of Strong’s and the new People’s Sexiest Man Alive, 2022, would play that role in due time.
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Although the idea of playing the “before” version of your super-muscular boyhood friend for the world’s largest film studio might not sound enticing to some, Strong reportedly “considered” taking the assignment since he “was penniless” and “needed money” as a failing actor in Hollywood.
Strong is also from Sudbury, Massachusetts, but not even the promise of a fat payday from the MCU was enough to get him to play his friend’s skinny, weaker double.
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Since “it was just never going to happen for me here,” as Strong puts it, “it didn’t feel like what I had to contribute was valued” in Los Angeles, he declined the role and soon after relocated to New York to pursue an acting career.
Evans “gasped” on the phone when he found out that Strong was being considered to play him in his pre-serum, non-superhero body, as reported by the Times U.K.
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“Oh no!” Evans exclaimed. “It just goes to show the industry is so unpredictable. But I’m so happy things worked out, because I don’t think there was ever plan B for Jeremy.”