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Chris Evans talks The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond

By Anne Brodie Oct 5, 2010, 16:41 GMT

The story of Fisher Willow, a Memphis débutante daughter of a plantation owner with a distaste for narrow-minded people and a penchant for shocking and insulting those around her. After returning from studies overseas, Fisher falls in love with Jimmy, the down-and-out son of an alcoholic father and an insane mother who works at a store on her family\'s plantation. She tries to pass him off as an upper-class suitor ...more

Chris Evans may be a Captain America and the Human Torch to some but to others the actor does his best work in smaller, artistic gems like The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, Jodie Markell’s film adaptation of a Tennessee Williams melodrama.

He stars as Jimmy, Blake Dallas Howard’s socially inferior lover in class-conscious Memphis of the 1920’s.  While the film is more challenging than most due to its formal language, it is also deeply moving in ways only Williams can express.  The man knows suffering. 

Monsters and Critics spoke with Evans.

How did you like delivering the line and speaking the way Williams has his characters speak – so formal, precise, and incredibly poetic?

It’s very mannered and hard for contemporary minds.  It’s very deliberate.  Williams is one of the most deliberate playwrights around.  Everything has meaning, trying to switch the simplest phrases, you’ll see the rhythm, which was one of the challenges, and you don’t get to do a lot of films like this where you have to treat the dialogue with respect.

I don’t know if I figured it out, but Jodie and Bryce are such fans of the theatre and the process and rehearsing and dissecting each word.  They helped me get through it.

How did you think about your character Jimmy?

He’s very different from me.  As an actor wear emotions on the sleeve, most of the Tennessee Williams men are pretty internalized, but for the most part his women are mad, crazy, compassionate, and sexual and the men are stoic. 
It was great to go against type and play someone who bites his tongue and lives by a certain code. 

Jimmy has a really complex backstory and personality, and he’s had bad times, which makes him empathetic.

The theme of responsibility permeates the whole film he knows what it is to be responsible.  He comes from a disgraced family; he has a poverty ridden background that was etched out of Tennessee’s life.  Jodie gave us these quotes that have to do with money and class and how it all played a part in his writing.  Jimmy has fallen from grace, he used to have money, and now his father’s a drunk and his mothers in an insane asylum. 

He walks around with a chip on his shoulder and swallows his pride on a daily basis; he’s a heartbreaking character. 

That’s how Tennessee Williams treats his men.  He treats women the way he does, based on suffering he saw in his own family.  Traditionally the women in his life were wild.  The Glass Menagerie, it’s all right there.

How do you separate your theatrical training and love of it from the pop Hollywood films you’ve made?

It’s getting trickier.  Originally I used to look for a part that speaks to me, theatre, no filter, theatre there’s your audience, and film is a giant collaboration of a ton of people trying to make a product.  I’ve seen 90% of my movies; I watch my own performance and say I didn’t know they were going to do that. 

A huge piece of the puzzle is the director.  I’ve seen wonderful scripts turned into terrible films and mediocre scripts turned into great films.  So at this point in my life, even if a part really rings true or I love the genre or the topic, if the director isn’t capable, I won’t do it.  Jodie is an actor’s director.  And she knows Tennessee Williams inside out. 

If you go there you need someone to hold your hand, as far as the technical aspect, I believe that will work itself out.  The belief is the character development.

From the Fantastic Four to Teardrop you can do your craft while also earning some big Hollywood money and clout. 

It’s beautiful!  That’s the beauty of film afford the opps to experience good writing and go to the Fantastic Four and pay the mortgage.

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