I just read this essay on ScreenRant.com about casting the movie version of Captain America. It’s very well thought out and worth the read. It reflects the perspective of someone not necessarily fanboy-obsessed with continuity, but definitely excited about the film–which I think is exactly the audience mentality Marvel is going to want to appeal to with this and any of it’s other movies.

And now I’m left trying to figure out who I’d want to see cast as The First Avenger: Captain America.

The word on the street is that the movie is going to be Cap’s origin as a runt kid volunteering to become a World War II super soldier, so it will be a period piece or, if it is set in modern times, it will be heavy on the WWII flashbacks. It’s speculation at this point whether the movie will touch on plot points such as the U.S. military testing the super soldier serum on guinea pig black soldiers (from Marvel’s Truth: Red, White, and Black mini), which could create an interesting context for all those rumors about Will Smith being considered for the role of Cap (he just wouldn’t be Steve Rogers). There’s also no official word on how much if any of the plot will involve SHIELD or Iron Man or, as it happened in the comics, Namor the Sub-Mariner fishing a frozen-in-ice Captain America out of the ocean and thawing him out to become a modern-day Avenger (though it’s probably a safe bet the movie will at least get us up to the moment, even if the whole reawakening bit doesn’t play out until the actual Avengers movie).

The casting of Steve Rogers may need to cover two roles: the scrawny kid with a big red, white, and blue heart and no chance of passing his army physical, and the genetically-enhanced super man that he is tranformed into–the ultimate blond-haired, blue-eyed Nazi ideal ironically engineered to kick those Ratzis up and down Europe, while en route to popping Hitler one on the jaw. Cap will need to look like he was injected with super soldier serum–big, muscular, imposing. Before that, he’ll need to look like a sunken-chested twerp. I suppose it is possible that technology can make it so we’re always looking at the same actor’s face, even if a stand-in needs to play the body of pre-serum Steve.

I believe in the comics Steve Rogers is from Brooklyn, but one change they should make for the movie is to make him more of an all-America boy from the heartland. He can always move to New York when he’s older (and discover his inner cartoonist, just like in the comics), so such a change shouldn’t be a problem to anyone. This consideration has more to do with an actor’s ability to play country mouse over city mouse, more than it has to do with the actor’s look.

And even though we tend to think of Cap as older–mainly because he’s got the midset of all the other Marvel heroes grandfather–he’d be a kid in this origin story. Thirty-plus-year-old men don’t generally enlist in the military. Steve is going to be 18, 19, maybe 20, to start things off. Even if the story has him in the military for years, he won’t be more than 20-something by the time he winds up in ice. Casting that is going to be tricky. The best bet will be to cast someone young enough to pull off a clean-shaven, bright-eyed 20, but who can then man up convincingly enough to ultimately wind up as the man barking orders at Tony Stark and the God of Thunder in the Avengers. But you can’t just cast Jon Hamm or Matthew McConaughy or any other actor pushing 40 who have been suggested.

So who can be our Star-Spangled Avenger? Here are a few possibilities:

Blond hair, blue eyes, strong chin, all-American looks–it makes sense that Paul Walker’s name has been floated for the part for a while now. He’s young enough–but not too young–to play the age range necessary for Cap, from young roughneck recruit to eventual leader of the World’s Mightiest Heroes.

Channing Tatum has already played one super soldier in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, so maybe he could slip on the wing-eared mask as well. I’d worry that he’s a little too young, and pretty green as an actor. But then again, if he’s surrounded by the kind of A-list actors Marvel has been putting into it’s recent crop of movies, maybe there will be some impressive castmates around to help elevate the kid’s game:

And then there’s The Marine–John Cena. He’s a genetic freak, but he’s still relatively young. And I’m a pro wrestling fan who knows what the guy has to do every night in front of live arena crowds for WWE, so I don’t doubt his acting ability or his capacity for physicality. Like the other two, his name has already come up in the rumor mill, but wrestlers are always mentioned and quickly dismissed when it comes to super hero movies. But if you want to get across the idea that the pipsqueak Steve Rogers is transformed into the ultimate prototype super soldier, it wouldn’t hurt to have the beanpole end up looking like this:

Who would you cast as Captain America?