Chris Evans is teaming up with Emily Blunt for Netflix’s Pain Hustlers.
Currently featured in Pixar prequel Lightyear and soon to be loathed in The Gray Man, Evans’ stock has continued to rise since his Marvel Cinematic Universe exit four years ago.
Deadline broke the news of his casting, with director David Yates (Harry Potter) ready to shoot Pain Hustlers next month.
Blunt will play the role of high-school dropout Liza Drake, who dreams of a better life for her and her young daughter.
She eventually secures a job with a floundering pharmaceutical startup in Central Florida, with her “charm, guts and drive” catapulting the company into the higher echelons, but things take a sinister turn when she finds herself in the middle of a criminal conspiracy.
Despite some level of life-and-death stakes, tonally, Pain Hustlers has been compared to The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short.
Switching your attention back to Lightyear, Evans exclusively told Digital Spy that stepping into the eponymous astronaut’s shoes was just as daunting as playing Captain America.
“At first, it was Captain America just because there were so many people who had an idea of the character and I thought jumping that hurdle would be tall enough. But now trying to fill these shoes is just as daunting,” he said.
Director and co-writer Angus MacLane was particularly impressed by Evans in the role, though.
“As a performer and as a person, he’s so affable and agreeable and such a wonderful creative collaborator that he’s very disarming,” he said. “When push comes to shove and he has to deliver something kind of awkward – for example, there’s an action sequence – and he can just watch the scene and we’ll turn the sound off and he can perform all the physical movements.” (DigitalSpy)