MY KIND OF PERFECT ⏛ british royal family faniction

Chapter Four: Esquire

A cloud descends over his face. His brow beetles. He shifts himself uncomfortably in his chair.

"It's not like, 'Oh, I love musicals!' " he says, throwing up a pair of jazz hands.

At first, I can't tell whether he's joking.

During my time with him, the same sequence will play out several times: I toss him what I think is a softball question . . . and suddenly he's glaring at me like I'm Red Skull, Captain America's Nazi foe.

Or maybe not Red Skull. But you get what I'm saying. He gives me an uncomfortable look that lets me know he's not pleased. It's like he's just waiting, ready for it. What arrow will this guy sling next?

At thirty-eight, Evans is twenty years younger than I am. I've never had $70 million in the bank, but I have gone through many of life's passages. For me, forty was a good age. I felt myself making new connections; things started to come together in a way they hadn't before. But forty is a tough age, too. I realized I was pretty much halfway played. When that sneaks into your head, it doesn't go away. Choices begin to feel more precious. You don't want to fuck it up.

With Evans, I sense that I am meeting a naturally shy superstar who feels as if he's done about a zillion too many interviews, as if he is always being boiled down into an essence that does not begin to accurately reflect his many nuances. His will to explain himself has worn thin.

His voice takes the tone of an overworked teacher trying to instruct a student who needs extra help.

"As a kid, theater is what's available to you, local plays. And it's usually going to be a musical. But musicals aren't the thing that I fell in love with. I just liked acting. I have a soft spot for theater, because it was such a big part of my childhood, a very sweet chapter in my life. But it's not like I've always said, 'Man, I got to get back to musical theater!' " The hands again. "My main reason for doing it was because I liked acting so much."

When we meet, Evans is counting down to the spring launch of his post–MCU passion project, a new political website called A Starting Point. It is meant to help inform and unify our divided electorate by providing a series of two-minute videos from elected officials. Organized by topic, it has opposing views conveniently juxtaposed. The basic notion: Exchanging ideas in a peaceful manner is a good way to begin to solve differences.

We move from the sitting area to the eat-in kitchen so that he can show me the site. His laptop is resting on a long, gleaming marble island. Across the room, I see the karaoke machine. I wonder fleetingly if he'd cleaned up a mess to prepare for my arrival. He may be on the Forbes list of the 100 richest celebrities, but he still seems like a guy who does his own chores.

The idea for A Starting Point began to take shape a few years ago, Evans says, when he was watching a news show and found himself wondering what an oft-heard acronym actually meant—he can't remember now, but it might have been NAFTA, the North American trade treaty, or maybe it was DACA, the Obama-era amnesty program for people brought illegally to this country as children. Either way, Evans was stumped. When he tried to Google an answer, he encountered a morass of competing headlines and long, confusing articles. "You're just like, 'Who is going to read twelve pages on something?' "

The whole experience got him thinking. "It just was one of those things where you see a hole and you think, I have an idea to fill that," he says.