How Chris Evans Reacted to His Infamous Photo Leak

By Michael Hein

It has now been about a year and a half since Chris Evans' infamous NSFW photo leak, and in hindsight, he handled it about as well as any celebrity has ever handled a scandal. The actor posted a screen-recorded video in September of 2020 which included a glimpse of his camera role where a photo of his penis was visible. Three days later, Evans responded in an interview on The Tamron Hall show.

"Did something happen this weekend?" Evans asked with feigned innocence. Smiling along with the audience, he said: "It was an interesting weekend full of lessons learned, a lot of teachable moments. Things happen. It's embarrassing, but you gotta roll with the punches." Evans has since been praised for his self-aware reaction to the scandal, and an interesting analysis by PopSugar's Mekishana Pierre even argued that the whole ordeal taught us all a lot about sexism in celebrity culture. Meanwhile, Evans used the notoriety from the debacle to draw attention to his philanthropic efforts.

"I will say, I have pretty fantastic fans who came to my support," Evans added. He was likely referring to the fans who condemned sharing the photo shortly after he deleted it. Some even went so far as to flood social media with different pictures of Evans and his dog, Dodger, in an attempt to subvert the trending algorithm.

At the time, Evans shared a video of his family on his Instagram Story which was made with a screen-record function. Just as the recording stopped, it reverted to a screenshot of Evans' camera roll, which contained — among other things — a dark picture of a penis. Fans took Evans' chagrinned commentary on the scandal to mean that it was, in fact, a photo of him.

Although Evans deleted the post soon after he realized his mistake, fans had already taken screenshots of it by then, sharing it amongst themselves online. Evans then stayed away from social media altogether until Monday night, when he tweeted: "Now that I have your attention... VOTE Nov 3rd!!!" He added a face-palm emoji and a shrugging emoji to show how he felt about the whole ordeal."

Evans' brother Scott Evans briefly went viral for responding to the scandal before Evans himself even did, tweeting: "Was off social media for the day yesterday. So. What'd I miss?" At the same time, Evans' Avengers co-star, Mark Ruffalo, posted his own teasing answer as well.

"Bro, while Trump is in office, there is NOTHING you could possibly do to embarrass yourself. See... silver lining," he wrote. Both Ruffalo and Evans have used the increased traffic from this scandal to promote political causes among their followers, sharing petitions, articles and videos about the 2020 presidential election.

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