Marvel star Paul Bettany reveals his Avengers co-stars Chris Evans and Anthony Mackie held a squat-jumping competition to determine which actor has “America’s ass.” The quip, inspired by Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Ant-Man’s (Paul Rudd) unsolicited commentary about the costumed backside of Captain America (Evans) in Avengers: Endgame, was hotly-debated by the Marvel movie’s creative team before becoming a long-running joke — and a real-life contest. After Mackie told KFC Radio that he contested Evans in a compression shorts test judged by their peers, Bettany reveals what really happened during the on-set competition between the two Captain America co-stars:
“I will tell you, Anthony’s ass is amazing. And I actually saw them talking together about their ass, and they decided to have a squat-jumping competition and who could jump over this thing [when] we were all on set somewhere,” the WandaVision star told KFC Radio. “Mackie went, ‘I’m gonna beat you! What are you talking about?’ I went to Chris, ‘Dude, he’s gonna beat you. Look at the size of his ass! He’s got more muscle in his ass cheeks than I have in my entire body, he’s gonna beat you.'”
Evans won the competition, but Mackie will become the new “America’s ass” when Sam Wilson returns in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
“Chris beat him. Chris was able to squat jump just from standing. It was unbelievable,” Bettany recalled. “That’s, unfortunately, the truth. But aesthetically? Anthony has an amazing ass. I mean, if you’d seen it, you would feel passionate about it too.”
But Bettany, who returns as the crimson creation called the Vision in WandaVision, says his character might have the best butt of them all.
“Unlike Captain America, my ass is a fake ass. It’s actually been molded to be a perfect ass,” Bettany quipped. “It’s a perfect android ass, so I think my ass is better than both of them.”
Explaining the origin of the joke in 2019, Endgame co-writer Stephen McFeely said “America’s ass” started as a “little meta” callback to 2012’s The Avengers.
“Chris Evans has never been comfortable with that outfit from the first Avengers movie. And so in the rearview, it’s a little way to wink at how that was then, and this is now. And then it sort of just built from there,” McFeely told The Los Angeles Times. “By the time we got to the fight scene where he defeated himself, his butt is on the ground, and he was just sitting there for a callback.”
New episodes of WandaVision premiere Fridays on Disney+. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier starts streaming on March 19.
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