How tall is Chris Evans?

How tall is Chris Evans? The listed figure

Chris Evans is listed on this site at 183 cm (6′0″). That figure comes from his Wikidata entry, which records 183 centimeters. Unlike an NBA roster or a physician's report, though, the entry cites no source for it. No studio biography or official measurement is publicly attached to it, so treat 6′0″ as the commonly cited figure rather than a confirmed one.

Evans was born on 13 June 1981 in Boston, Massachusetts, according to Wikidata, which lists four references for the date. For a height site, the most interesting chapter of his career is the role of Steve Rogers, the man who becomes Captain America after an experimental serum. In that role his on-screen size changed dramatically, through a combination of training and some of the most precise body-scaling visual effects of the early 2010s.

Captain America's canon height versus the actor

Marvel's comic-book Steve Rogers is listed on this site at 188 cm (6′2″). That makes the character about 5 cm, or two inches, taller than Evans's listed height. Two inches is a small gap, and the films never treated Evans's height as a problem to solve. The challenge ran the other way.

You can compare Evans with the character directly on this site's Captain America page. The more interesting story, though, is not how Evans compared with the comics. It is how the filmmakers made the same actor appear to be two very different heights in one film.

Making "Skinny Steve": shrinking a 220 lb actor

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) needed its hero to begin as a frail, undersized young man rejected by the army, and then emerge from the serum as a super-soldier. Rather than cast two actors, the production had Evans play both versions. The job of shrinking him went to Lola VFX in Santa Monica, with VFX supervisor Edson Williams. Christopher Townsend was the production's overall VFX supervisor.

fxguide's detailed case study gives the scale of the challenge. Lola had to turn "the 220 pound Evans" into the roughly 140-pound man the story needed. According to the case study, Steve Rogers was meant to vary between 6′4″ and 5′4″ across the film. Lola worked on more than 300 shots, most of them for the body transformation. The film as a whole had nearly 1,600 visual effects shots, spread across more than a dozen vendors.

Three techniques

fxguide describes three methods, used in different proportions:

The dominant approach was to keep Evans's real performance and make him smaller. Lola tested fully CG heads, 3D projections and head replacements before choosing 2D manipulation. In practice, that meant much more than a simple uniform reduction. Townsend told fxguide it was not just a ten percent reduction in scale.

Not shrinking everything equally

What makes the work remarkable for a height site is how carefully it treated proportions. A uniformly shrunk man looks like a miniature, not a small man. So Lola scaled different parts of Evans's body by different amounts:

The face had to remain recognizably Evans, so the eyes were reduced less than the jaw. Lola also gaunted the cheeks, re-flattened the chin, sank the eyes and thinned the neck. It kept about 40 percent of Evans's five o'clock shadow so that the smaller Steve still read as an adult man. Shadows were removed before scaling and selectively added back, and skin grain was matched afterward, because shrunken areas tend to look unnaturally sharp. A 3D model of Evans, updated throughout production, served as a reference so the scaling stayed consistent from shot to shot.

The rest of the effects work built around Evans

Skinny Steve was the showpiece, but fxguide's coverage of the film's super-soldier effects shows how much other work involved Evans's body and scale. Evil Eye Pictures composited the car scenes in which skinny Steve and Peggy Carter travel to the laboratory, so the shrunken Steve had to sit convincingly beside a full-size co-star in a moving vehicle. LOOK Effects composited green-screen plates of Evans into a montage, and Fuel handled blue-screen composites of Captain America in the motorbike chase.

The approach Lola chose came out of an early test. As fxguide describes it, the studio filmed a very large man and a smaller man and set itself the brief of making the first look like the second, trying both mesh warping and 2D manipulation before settling on the latter. That test is a useful reminder of what the problem really was. Making a 6′0″ man look short is not mainly about height. Proportions, posture, the thickness of the neck and wrists, and how clothing hangs all tell a viewer how big someone is, long before anyone thinks about inches.

The body double: Leander Deeny at 5′7″

For the shots that needed a real smaller body, the production cast Leander Deeny, an English, Shakespeare-trained stage actor who dieted for the part. fxguide gives Deeny's height as 5′7″, and describes him as a full four inches taller than skinny Steve. That would put the on-screen character at about 5′3″, slightly below the 5′4″ low end mentioned elsewhere in the same case study. The case study does not resolve the difference. Either way, skinny Steve was meant to read as roughly 20 cm shorter than the 6′0″ actor playing him.

Deeny performed in three ways: as the full-body double in some shrunken shots, as the body under Evans's projected face in about 5 percent of Lola's shots, and as the lighting and body reference in every shot. Williams told fxguide that many of Deeny's performances could not be used as direct reference because of his stage-trained movement, and that Evans was the more fluid screen actor. That is one reason the team relied so heavily on shrinking Evans himself.

On-set tricks that sold the height difference

Digital work only succeeds if the original footage supports it, and fxguide lists several practical tricks used on set:

• Bent knees and shorter steps. Evans walked with flexed knees and a shortened stride, so his movement matched a smaller frame before any digital scaling.
• Lowered seats. Chairs were dropped so a seated Steve sat lower relative to others.
• Oversized clothes. Shirts and a helmet were deliberately too big, which visually shrank the man inside them.
• Adjusted eyelines. Co-stars looked lower, toward where skinny Steve's eyes would end up, rather than at Evans's real eye level.
• Clean passes. Plates without actors were shot so that background objects, like barbed wire, could be restored around the smaller figure.

Townsend told fxguide that a man standing still was far easier to shrink than one in motion. Shots were planned with that in mind, for example by framing above the feet. Another vendor, The Senate, replaced Evans's rubber boots with CG feet built from a scan of his own feet. Method Studios built a digital double of the post-serum Captain America for a plane-jump shot.

Chris Evans next to the Avengers cast

Outside that first film, Evans's 183 cm puts him in the middle of the Avengers' main cast on this site's figures:

Two pairings stand out. Evans and Robert Downey Jr., whose characters are central to the series, are about 10 cm apart, with Evans the taller man. And Evans gives up about 8 cm to Chris Hemsworth, the tallest of the core Avengers on this site.

The comic-book Spider-Man is listed on this site at 177.8 cm, about 5 cm shorter than Evans. Tom Holland, who played Spider-Man in the films, is about 10 cm shorter than Evans, which means the screen Spider-Man is noticeably smaller than his comic-book self.

Chris Evans compared with the average American man

At 183 cm, Evans is comfortably above average for an American man without being exceptionally tall. The CDC's national survey for August 2021 to August 2023 puts the average American man aged 20 and over at 68.9 inches (175.0 cm). Evans is about 8 cm (3 inches) taller.

The NCD-RisC estimates on this site's United States average height page put American men born around 1976, close to Evans's 1981 birth year, at 177.5 cm. Against his own generation he stands roughly 5.5 cm above the mean.

That last row makes the scale of the 2011 effect clear. To play skinny Steve, Evans had to read on screen as about 12 to 15 cm shorter than the average American man. In height terms, he had to move from well above average to well below it.

Comparing Evans with other people on the site

Height comparisons for Evans tend to fall into two groups: his Marvel co-stars and his comic-book alter ego. The first are measured people whose listings vary by source. The second is a fictional figure with a canonical height. Because Evans's own 183 cm comes from an unreferenced listing, small differences of a centimeter or two should be read with caution.

To see the Avengers lined up, or to compare Evans with the comics' Captain America, use the height difference calculator or browse other actors on the celebrities hub.