Every great superhero of the modern era needs a thankless, underwritten love interest, and actresses like Kirsten Dunst, Bryce Dallas Howard, Katie Holmes, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly and Kate Bosworth have all ignored the fact that their characters had nothing to do to cash a big paycheck. Captain America is no different, and the role of Peggy Carter, an American fighter with the French Resistance who becomes Steve Roger’s girlfriend, has been courting a number of big-name actresses.
Emily Blunt, Keira Knightley and Alice Eve were said to be the front-runners for the role, although Blunt, who also came very close to playing the Black Widow in “Iron Man 2,” before Fox exercised a long-held option and forced the actress to join “Gulliver’s Travels,” apparently turned the project down last week. Now it looks like Knightley’s out of contention for the role too (again, we imagine she turned it down, somehow…), as E! are reporting that Alice Eve is now leading the pack for the part.
Eve was always the most likely candidate, as the cheapest and least-well-known of the three actresses, and has some heat coming off the (very) modest success of “She’s Out Of My League,” as well as a major supporting role this summer in “Sex and the City 2.” She doesn’t have the role locked up yet, however, as the same story also suggests that Hayley Atwell (“Brideshead Revisited,” “The Duchess”) is also screen-testing for a second time today in London.
Eve clearly has the WW2 pin-up look down, as the picture above attests, and she’s a very good actress (she was excellent on stage in Tom Stoppard’s “Rock & Roll”), but Atwell’s a great one — her debut in the BBC mini-series “The Line of Beauty” was truly outstanding. We also reckon she’d be a little more convincing as a resistance fighter, in our opinion, so she’d definitely be our choice for the role. Bearing in mind Captain America’s eventual fate, being frozen during World War Two, and being woken in the present day, there may also be a tragic element to the love story in the picture, which should at least make it a little more interesting. Whichever actress lands the role, they’ll be joining Chris Evans, Hugo Weaving and the recently announced Sebastian Stan when “The First Avenger: Captain America” goes before cameras this summer in London.