It isn't easy being Captain America. Out on the Avengers: Age Of Ultron press circuit, Chris Evans has been talking about his gruelling schedule, currently almost exclusively for Marvel, taking him well into 2017. And as part of that he's revealed something that we might have suspected but didn't actually know: both halves of the two part mega-epic Avengers: Infinity War will shoot together next year.
"You plan around the Marvel responsibilities; you have to," Evans tells Esquire. "We start [Captain America: Civil War] in a couple of weeks, and then that shoots until August or something like that. August or September. Then I've got some downtime and I can do with it as I please. I don't know if I want to take time off or go pursue another directing job or find a movie to act in or, you know, do whatever I'm creatively inclined to pursue or wait, relax, enjoy my life. And then we start the Infinity War, I think, some time in the third quarter. Fall or winter of 2016. That's going to be like nine months to shoot both movies back to back."
Elsewhere in the interview he also talks about the "pressure and anxiety" of the standalone Captain America movies. But it's not all stress. There's his close friendship with Chris Hemsworth as consolation, along with the confidence that Marvel's batting average is so astonishingly high.
"The first [Captain America] was the most intense," he says, "because you just don't know how the character's going to be received, you don't know how you're going to be received portraying the character. With the second one, there's a little less pressure, but again, you still don't want to be the weak link in the chain. Marvel's got such a track record for making quality work, you don't want to be a dud. But even their worst movies are better than what any other studio could hope to be making. It can only get so bad at Marvel."
Avengers: Age Of Ultron, you may have noticed, is out now. Captain America: Civil War is out in the UK on April 29 next year. Avengers: Infinity War Part I lands two years later on April 27, 2018, with Part II following a year after that on April 26, 2019. Joe and Anthony Russo, who brought us Captain America: The Winter Soldier, are directing all three.