If you enjoy the time-honored sport of celebrity political clapbacks on Twitter, you’ll be disappointed to learn that soon, there will be one less player in the game. Chris Evans, Captain America himself, revealed in our April/May cover story that he’s putting the brakes on his no-holds-barred Twitter presence, opting to pull back on political tweets as he rolls out his new passion project. That project is A Starting Point, a new bipartisan website where elected officials will sit for educational two-minute videos on a variety of subjects, each of them meant to inform and unite our increasingly divided electorate.
With over 13 million Twitter followers, Evans has developed a reputation as a celebrity fond of liberal causes. He once called Donald Trump a “dumb shit” on Twitter, while on another occasion comparing Senator Lindsay Graham to Smithers, the notoriously sycophantic assistant to Mr. Burns, the cruel billionaire on The Simpsons. As A Starting Point’s launch date approaches in the coming weeks, Evans has tweeted his support for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who accused her conservative colleagues of playing favorites with the Trump Administration.
However, facing a deficit of videos from right-wing lawmakers, whom he claims didn’t want to sit for interviews with him, Evans has vowed to walk back his incendiary tweets. “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,” he said.
The idea for A Starting Point was born a few years ago when Evans Googled an oft-heard political acronym (he can’t remember which one), only to fall down the rabbit hole of confusing headlines and byzantine scholarly articles, none of which yielded an answer. The experience got him thinking--there had to be a better way.
“It just was one of those things where you see a hole and you think, I have an idea to fill that,” Evans said.
Over the past year, Evans and his business partner, actor and director Mark Kassen, have traveled to Washington D.C. nine times to interview and film 160 elected officials. Those officials included Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz, among others.
“I just want to say to people, ‘You know what’s helpful?’ That’s the beginning of the sentence,” Evans said. “The site is not an antidote. It’s not medicine. It’s not a cure. It’s not the solution. It’s just something I think is helpful. But one thing I’m really trying to stay away from is declaring, ‘This is what’s wrong with today.’ ”
Donald Trump can sleep a little sounder tonight, knowing that he won’t have Captain America coming after him, anymore--at least, not for now. Check out the rest of our interview with Evans dishes on his family's political history, life after the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Defending Jacob, his new Apple TV+ show.
