He jokes his two-hour workouts were so "relentless," he'd curse himself for taking the role after each one. Chris Evans hardly survived the four-month training for his Captain America role.
"We did two hours a day, and it was brutal. I usually like working out. Going in sucks, but walking out, you're like, 'I'm glad I did that!' This was different," he tells PopSugar.
REVIEW: Captain America
"I'd walk out and I'd be like, 'I need to vomit. I hate this trainer. I hate this movie. I want to go to sleep for a week.' It was just relentless. I've got a fast metabolism and I lose weight very quickly, so for me to get big, it was just eat a lot," he added. "Working out sucked, eating sucked more. You get to a point where you just can't even look at another piece of chicken. You're just so bloated, but you just have to keep consuming protein, so that was tricky."
Still, he doesn't regret shooting the film.
"The fact is, no matter how long a list you could create of the negatives, the positives trump it," he says. "I make movies… I wear a shield, I get paid a lot of money to run around and play make believe. I'm not in the coal mines. I'm not flipping burgers. Life is great."
He initially turned down the role because he was "apprehensive about the commitment."
"It started out as a nine-picture commitment and it dropped down to six. If all of a sudden my passion changed, if I wanted to write or direct, or leave the career — go live in the mountains, get married, have kids, lead a normal life — you can't," he explains to PopSugar. "And I guess I just wasn't 100 percent positive that my end game was to be a gigantic movie star."
"The second part was just about the lifestyle change. I can still go to a ball game and I can still go to the grocery store and lead a pretty normal life. There's a difference between dealing with [fame] sometimes, dealing with it most of the time, and dealing with it all the time. All the time is something you can't conceptualize until it happens, and once you're there, you can't turn it off. There's no rewind," he adds.
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Chris Rock: Never Scared is the hot comic's fourth HBO special and proves as disciplined and trenchant as his previous cable concerts. Announcing he's a recent father, Rock proclaims his biggest job is keeping his daughter "off the pole," i.e., steering her away from the life of a stripper. Warming to the theme, Rock asks why so many strippers earn money to pay for expensive tuitions yet he's never received "a smart lap dance." Things turn topical as Rock argues that his government won't solve the murders of rappers. ("More people saw Tupac get shot than watched the last episode of Seinfeld.") After taking broadsides at Michael Jackson ("Ed Bradley tried his best to make Michael look like a mammal!") and David Blaine ("Are we so desperate we fall for a trickless magician?"), Rock builds to a near-lecture (funny, though) on why white America won't let people of color acquire real wealth. --Tom Keogh
Comedian Chris Rock makes a raucous return to his stand-up roots in this HBO special filmed at Harlem's legendary Apollo Theater. Despite his manic and profane delivery, Rock's comedy is often rooted in traditional subjects for comedians: family relationships, misunderstandings between men and women, and observations on how childhood has changed. But he takes his material right to the edge, proving himself to be a sharp-eyed satirist. Serious and timely issues, such as school shootings or children being neglected by partying parents, are tackled by Rock, who's not afraid to slip in a serious point while being hysterically funny. His defense of President Clinton against his accusers is a good example of how Rock's material is almost always bound to offend someone: he slices through the self-righteous rhetoric of the impeachment spectacle, but even the behavior he defends comes in for ridicule with jokes that are extremely funny as well as extremely coarse. The pace of this one-hour show is uneven, and some viewers will no doubt find Rock's penchant for using profanity as punctuation tiresome. But those who like intelligent comedy with a hard edge will find much to laugh at in Chris Rock: Bigger and Blacker. -- Robert J. McNamara