Why Chris Evans Should Not Play Gene Kelly

Last week, it was reported that Chris Evans — an actor best known for fronting the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Captain America for the last ten years — is developing an original idea for a movie in which he would play the legendary Hollywood dancer and movie star Gene Kelly.

The idea is said to focus on the imaginary friendship between Kelly and a twelve-year-old boy who works on the MGM studio lot in the 1950s. While this in and of itself sounds like a pleasant (if too innocent?) idea for a movie, it drew immediate ire from this critic, who couldn’t have been more dismayed if Evans had announced that he planned to star in the life of Charlie Chaplin. (Oh, right — Iron Man already did that…)

For those who aren’t familiar with Gene Kelly, he was one of the two great male dancer American movie stars of the twentieth century. That may sound awfully specific, but it gives an idea of just how unusual Kelly was: aside from Fred Astaire, who famously made a series of successful, urbane romantic comedies with actor and dancing partner Ginger Rogers in the 1930s (here’s a scene from their movie Top Hat [‘35] as reference), Kelly is arguably the only American man who has ever become a movie star on the basis of his dancing. (To my mind, John Travolta is the only plausible exception. Or maybe Channing Tatum.)

Following a short and successful career on Broadway in the late ‘30s, Gene Kelly acted in, choreographed, and occasionally directed a string of colorful, thrilling Hollywood musicals in which he usually played an artist with athletic abilities, or an athlete with artistic abilities: Cover Girl (‘44); The Pirate (‘48); On the Town (“New York, New York, it’s a helluva town…” ‘49); the Best Picture-winning An American in Paris (‘51); and his most beloved work, Singin’ in the Rain (‘52).

Kelly was distinct from Fred Astaire, against whom he was often compared, for a couple of reasons: one, his dancing was more robust and impressionistic. Kelly came from a working class background and trained with legendary avant-garde choreographer Martha Grahame. This differed from Astaire’s tidier, more traditional style, and spoke to an idea of American manhood that was grounded in emotion and instinct rather than composure and refinement. (Kelly himself once quipped: “If Astaire was the aristocracy, I was the proletariat.”)

And second, Kelly was ambitious. While Fred Astaire only ever appeared in films, Kelly took a rigorously active role behind the scenes — creating movie musicals that aspired to a new level of technical and formal sophistication. In Anchors Aweigh (1945), Kelly danced with Jerry the cartoon mouse, thus helping to pioneer the technology that could put human actors and animated creatures in the same frame, and at the time of its release, An American in Paris was heralded as a major artistic triumph — due in no small part to its final, seventeen-minute dance sequence (you can watch the first part of it here), which Kelly choreographed to the George Gershwin symphony for which the film is named.

He was a singular presence in the history of American cinema. There hasn’t been anyone else like him, before or since — so the idea of casting Gene Kelly doesn’t immediately yield any obvious, well-known candidates. And I can’t say that Captain America would be anywhere near the top of my list.

This isn’t to say that Chris Evans is a bad actor. Before signing over his soul to Disney with Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Evans managed to locate humor and intelligence in a number of flashy though, by Marvel’s standards, leaner projects: The Perfect Score (‘04); Fantastic Four (‘05); Push (‘09); Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (‘10); and Snowpiercer (‘13). There’s a knowingness to Evans that’s underutilized, mostly because the films he makes, both now and then, rarely have any sense of nuance. He could easily step into more offbeat roles and play slick yet emotionally evasive men — think of him as any character Redford ever played. Think of him as Jay Gatsby. (And while we’re being real about actors’ abilities, Gene Kelly wasn’t exactly the next Stanislavsky.)

But I don’t think Evans being a competent actor is reason enough for him to step into Kelly’s tap shoes. Walking in the footsteps of giants (for Kelly is a giant) is a delicate task that requires the utmost creative sensitivity — and a degree of self-awareness that Evans’ biopic is already, clearly missing.

First of all, there’s the obvious lack of physical resemblance. Gene Kelly was five foot seven. He had black, bristly hair, solid brown eyes and olive skin. He was short, compact, trim, and agile. Chris Evans is a six-foot-tall superhero with Aryan features and musculature that could make Hercules blush.

There’s also the reality of where either man came from. Kelly was born to a blue collar immigrant family — his father was a salesman — in Pittsburgh just before the First World War. While financially supporting his parents during the Great Depression, Kelly worked his way through college before deciding to open a dance studio and teach local children. He didn’t begin his career as a choreographer until the age of twenty-six, and he appeared in his first movie four years later. Evans, by contrast, was born at the start of the Reagan era and grew up in an upper-middle class suburb of Boston. (His father was a dentist.) He performed in stage musicals as a high school student and moved to Los Angeles while still a teenager. By the age of twenty-four, he was a movie star.

I realize that these biographical details may seem arbitrary, and, ideally, where an actor geographically comes from shouldn’t inform casting decisions. But I mention all of this to emphasize my point: Gene Kelly and Chris Evans are vastly different people, in terms of their origins and the ways in which those origins literally shaped them. Growing up with an uncertain income during a time of major socioeconomic upheaval makes for a scrappier, more wiry sensibility whereas living off the fatted calf of gated Massachusetts society generates a somewhat more luxuriating, indulgent attitude.

The effort of Kelly’s life is evident in every ounce of his slender, quicksilver body, just as the plushness of Evans’ accounts for his massive frame and sly recessiveness.

All of this adds up to what I see as being the greater, spiritual reason for the inadequacy of Evans’ self-casting. Though they are both megastars, just as these two men came from very different backgrounds, they have chosen to live and perform in vastly different ways. One devoted his life to a demanding craft which he then applied to filmmaking with unprecedented genius, while the other has made millions playing at the narrowest possible articulation of heroism. Granted, their respective Hollywoods are very different places: Gene Kelly made a name for himself when movies still had to rely on practical effects and charismatic personalities to sell tickets, whereas Chris Evans has the benefit of computers to generate billion-dollar spectacle after billion-dollar spectacle.

The movies no longer have to try to be good, and it’s perhaps representative of Hollywood’s history as a whole that Kelly, whose life was so defined by limitations, ended up creating wondrous and enduring fantasies, whereas Evans, for all his material wealth, has yet to make a movie that doesn’t rely on CGI to be memorable.

These distinct media environments communicate a fundamental crisis in the quality of American movies, but they also show how warped American audiences’ ideas of manhood have become. Whereas once the essence of being an adult man was all about applying yourself to a profession or some other mode of self-expression (e.g. Humphrey Bogart as a detective, John Wayne as a cowboy, Cary Grant as Cary Grant), today the expectation is that men demonstrate an overt material surplus of “masculinity” — either through muscles or guns, usually both.

Cinematically, we are living in the era of G.I. Joe. People like Dwayne Johnson, Chris Hemsworth and Michael B. Jordan regularly assume roles that feed into a spectacle of militaristic manhood that is driven by the influence of commercial warfare and our culture’s lingering knack for homophobia. In many ways, today’s popular movies are more conservative than those that were popular seventy-five years ago. The first movie Gene Kelly ever made, For Me in My Gal (1942), was a musical about two vaudeville stars. It was the second-highest grossing movie of the year. The second-highest grossing American film last year? No Time to Die.

To opt into such a culture says something about the values of the men who choose to work in Hollywood today. I don’t think Chris Evans deserves to play Gene Kelly — if for no other reason than the fact that his career is founded on the exploitation of a hyper-masculinized, patriarchal ideology. Offscreen, he comes across as a sweet, well-intentioned person: he practices Buddhism, runs an affably woke Twitter account, and voiced his support for same sex marriage a cozy three years before it became law. But good intentions can’t make up for the trite, infantilizing culture that Marvel has fostered, and which Evans continues to propagate by signing onto projects like Lightyear (2022).

The breed of playful, fleet-footed manhood that Gene Kelly represents is in short supply today, at least among A-list stars. Sure Evans gets greenlit on a biopic tribute to Kelly (Hollywood loves to sentimentalize itself: L.A. Confidential (1997), The Artist (2011), La La Land (‘16), etc) — but would Walt Disney Studios invest in anything nearly so humane or aspirational as An American in Paris today?

The only reason anyone would want to see a biopic about Gene Kelly is for his dance, and for the life that was built around it. How can this be done justice by a man whose life trajectory is built solely upon the premise of getting bigger?

I will concede that there’s a possible benefit to having so emotionally fluent a man as Kelly embodied by someone who is associated with “manliness”: what better way to educate young audiences, especially boys, than by reframing their favorite superhero as a man who likes to do ballet? But ultimately, given the two-dimensionality of his previous work (this includes Snowpiercer and Knives Out [2019] — yes, I don’t think either of them is that great), Evans’ presence convinces me that the film will be a cheesy, undiscerning affair. If Chris Evans doesn’t normally prioritize depth in the projects he chooses, why should we expect this next undertaking to be anything other than shallow?

If his life must be turned into a movie, then Gene Kelly deserves to be played by a true actor — someone who is devoted to observation and self-examination, who can discover and convey the man’s firm anxiety, his fluttering eyes and squared jaw. We need an actor who can dance, who spends all their hours not lifting at the gym but bounding across a stage. Someone unknown, perhaps. Someone not normally seen onscreen. Someone who can tap into the hardscrabble, resilient spirit that made Kelly so distinctly original.