It’s hard to imagine a serious actor like Jeremy Strong subjugating himself to the CGI-laden indignity of portraying a superhero – especially after the infamous New Yorker profile – but at one stage, he was actually on track to play Captain America in 2011’s The First Avenger. Well… pre-serum Steve Rogers.
“OK, fuck it, I will tell you this story. They told me there was a top-secret film about Captain America,” Jeremy Strong recently told The Sunday Times.
“They needed someone to play Captain America’s young body before he turns into a superhero. They said they needed a transformational actor and would use CGI to put the actual actor’s face and voice over my own.”
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“I was broke. I needed money. I considered it. But that’s my story of LA.”
Of course, the Emmy winner would ultimately turn down the role, which eventually went to Leander Deeny; the latter also appears as a bartender in The First Avenger. Marvel Studios’ offer, in addition to a “strange audition” for Cowboys & Aliens in which he rocked up in full cowboy attire, led Strong to abandon Hollywood. At least for the time being.
Strong added: “It was just never going to happen for me here. It didn’t feel like what I had to offer was valued… And the next day I went back to New York and did a play about a veteran from Afghanistan in a wheelchair during the blackout of 2003.”
The entire reveal was so surprising, not even Chris Evans – who not only held the mantle of Steve Rogers / Captain America but grew up in Sudbury, Massachusetts with Jeremy Strong; having even acted opposite one other in a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – knew about this development.
“Oh no!” Chris Evans exclaimed after reportedly letting out a gasp.
“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.”
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Long before Strong was a household name, Evans had apparently been a longtime fan ever since he saw him play a hobbit during their childhood; a performance the Marvel alumni recalls was “phenomenal.”
As for Jeremy Strong, walking away from Captain America: The First Avenger obviously wasn’t the end of his career, but rather the beginning.
The year after, he’d appear in both Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln as the John George Nicolay to Daniel Day-Lewis titular US President Abraham Lincoln and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty as a CIA analyst, before achieving a heightened level of fame with The Big Short, Molly’s Game, The Gentlemen, and of course, HBO’s Succession.
