The seventeen most endearing, wry, or improbable things the endearing, wry, and improbable star of Captain America said to us during a ninety-minute conversation:
1. I just randomly tackle people in the streets when it suits me.
2. When I met with the director of
Captain America [out July 22], I hadn't seen the script, and I had to go meet him, and we spoke for like an hour. With a lot of those big films, they'll do that instead of an audition — and I prefer them, because I love a chat. I've found the messier the meeting gets, the more successful. You vomit on someone's shirt, it's probably going to work in your favor. Because you shared something: an intimate moment of drunken behavior.
3. When Chris Evans first took his shirt off on the set of
Captain America, I just instinctively grabbed his man boob. They kept it in the film. So we did a couple of takes of me being really inappropriate with my hand on his pec for the duration of the scene.
4. I was wearing Spanx. A big old pair of Spanx. Really hot.
5. I'd been wanting to do an "action" film and of course I get cast in an action film set in the forties. [Note: Her oeuvre is mostly period films:
Brideshead Revisited (2008),
The Duchess (2008), and last year's Starz miniseries
The Pillars of the Earth, which earned her her first Golden Globe nomination. In
Captain America, she plays a British military agent.]
15. Tommy Lee Jones [who plays an American military officer in
Captain America] is
really scary. Because he'll take his time answering a question. It feels like he's ignored you. He does it long enough for you to feel completely humiliated. I said hello to him and then there was a long pause and then he said, "Do you like opera?" He's got a very, very dry sense of humor.
17. I'll be a wreck when [
Captain America] premieres. I'm gonna grow a beard.