Chris Evans backed off criticising Trump ahead of launching political website

Chris Evans has been known to criticise President Trump in the past. He’s likened another Republican, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, to the Simpsons character Smithers, the yes-man to baddie Mr. Burns.

You might have noticed, though, The Captain America star is taking a more neutral political stance now, at least on social media.

It’s part of the launch of his political website, A Starting Point, which is expected to go live this spring.

“I’m going to take my foot off the gas [of social media] for a little bit until we get this thing up and running,” Evans says in the April/May issue of Esquire.

Evans explains that he’s sat down to interview 160 elected officials over the past year for the website. The idea is to offer them up in two-minute videos featuring politicians taking various sides of an issue, with the goal of breaking down a topic from various perspectives to make them simple and concise for everyone to understand.

Read more: Evans not keen on Marvel return

The problem is that, at least for those initial interviews, most of the people he spoke with are on the same side.

“A lot of Republicans didn’t want to sit with me,” Evans tells the magazine.

A big exception was Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, who spoke with him in February. Cruz documented the meeting — and how much it thrilled his daughter to meet the superhero in the flesh — on Twitter.

Evans’s mother, Lisa Capuano Evans, reveals to Esquire that, in fact, her son almost didn’t take his most famous role. He was afraid of how it would affect his life.

“His biggest fear was losing his anonymity,” she tells the magazine. “He said, ‘I have a career now where I can do work I really like. I can walk my dog. Nobody bothers me. Nobody wants to talk to me. I can go wherever I want. And the idea of losing that is terrifying to me.”

Nearly a decade later, the Knives Out star said it’s unlikely that he’ll put on his Captain America costume again, and he’s put much of his focus into the website. Studying politics has been a big job.

“We were just so aware of the fact that we weren’t in our lane,” Evans says of himself and his business partner, actor and director Mark Kassen. “There was so much to learn, starting with the vernacular. Like, you don’t say the word politician; you say elected official.”

Still, Evans continues to act. He’ll show up next in the Apple TV + show Defending Jacob, about an assistant district attorney’s 14-year-old son being charged with murder.

“I don’t put myself in a box. I don’t have some huge plan in terms of what my goals are,” Evans says. “I just kind of wake up and follow my appetite. I’m at a point in my life now where I have the very, very fortunate luxury of pursuing what I want to do. And I don’t corrupt that process by thinking about how other people see me.”