Chris Evans on why Avengers cast made an “embarrassing” Grease music video that will never see the light of day
After years of rumours about the big Marvel dance party, we’re finally learning the truth.
Why did the Avengers shoot half a music video on the set of Captain America: Civil War, never to be released? Ever since Anthony Mackie revealed in 2017 that this bizarre musical moment had happened fans have wondered – why on Earth was this filmed? What happened to the footage? And why, why, WHY have we never seen it?
For years, this unknown sequence has lived on in legend, a dark secret never to be unlocked – until now. Because in a new Variety interview with fellow Marvel hero Paul Rudd, erstwhile Sentinel Of Liberty Chris Evans has revealed the backstory behind the All-Marvel dance party, as well as the reason why the “embarrassing” footage will never see the light of day.
“I don’t know if you remember this,” Evans said to Rudd, calling back memories of their first meeting on the set of Captain America: Civil War.
“On that day, it was literally the day I met you, [Anthony] Mackie and I and Scarlett [Johansson] got in our head that we were going to shoot — this is so hilarious — a little video just for the Marvel gang, like a little culmination, like a yearbook video, set to that song from Grease. ‘We go together, like rama lama,’ whatever that song is.
"We were just going to go around, take little clips of videos of people dancing and cut it all together. The first day I was like, ‘All right, I’ll start collecting some of this footage.’ I have the footage."
Apparently, Rudd was quite forthcoming when it came to busting some moves, despite it being his first day on set.
“I was like, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. You don’t know me, but can I get this?’" Evans recalled. "It was you, Mackie, I think [Jeremy] Renner, Sebastian, and I just said, ‘Look, everyone, just dance for 30 seconds,’ and you did it. You were a great sport. You willingly danced with little explanation from me, and then I never completed the video. I just abandoned it. But I got that footage of our first day of meeting of you dancing.”
Then, later in the interview Evans actually managed to track down the footage (the joys of on-computer interviews), at which point he remembered exactly why the project had been abandoned…
“I’m sorry, I found it. It’s unbelievable. I can’t show it — it’s way too embarrassing,” he told Rudd. “Oh, it’s so bad.”
“We had this idea of making a music video, of this song,” co-star Anthony Mackie previously said in 2017. “And we shot half of it, and then people realised how bad they were at dancing, and we couldn’t get anyone else to dance.
“Mark Ruffalo dancing is a spectacle that everyone should behold once in their life,” he laughed. “Once!
“You never wanna see it twice. So that was probably [the funniest moment] – Mark Ruffalo, with polka dots and a skintight suit on, dancing. Awful.”
Clearly, with teases like this we MUST see this footage. Fingers crossed someone can persuade them to release it for the MCU’s 20th anniversary in 2028…
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Authors
Huw Fullerton is a Commissioning Editor for Radio Times magazine, covering Entertainment, Comedy and Specialist Drama.
