**GQ: Right. He’s a super soldier built to fight Nazis, but he doesn’t need a gun… **

Matt Salinger: But I was really good with that shield! I’ll match my shield skills with this guy any day.

**GQ: What was one of the cheesiest effects you had to pull off? **

Matt Salinger: In my costume they gave me these ears—they weren’t my real ears—they just had this plastic that was part of the costume, these rubber ears. And there were some shots where they just looked so bad. Really kind of cheesy.

**GQ: Before you transform into Captain America, characters keep referring to you as this "frail boy." You looked anything but frail. **

Matt Salinger: Yeah, that’s just what they did. They didn’t double cast it. In the current movie it looks like they double cast it and that might have been the smarter…

**GQ: Actually it’s Chris Evans’ head with some CGI trickery… **

Matt Salinger: Well, see, there you go. If we had the budget or wherewithal to do something like that, they probably would have. I was a big guy who was in good shape and was athletic, but not the bulging, ripped muscle guy. I learned at one point that they offered my part to Howie Long—I met him, somewhere, and he mentioned that he had been offered that part. In a way, that was sort of a more typical, generic, over-the-top way to go with it. We’ll never know how that movie would have been.

**GQ: When did you first find out that the film wouldn’t get a theatrical release? **

Matt Salinger: To my way of looking at it, when we didn’t finish the film, I would have been surprised if it had gotten into the theaters. If they didn’t have the budget to finish the film, they weren’t going to have the budget to distribute it. [The director] told the editors to put it together the best they could then they released it on video. That was that. Everyone under the age of ten seemed to really love it [laughs] and most people over the age of ten saw it for what it was—they saw it as a missed opportunity.

**GQ: The Roger Corman version of The Fantastic Four made in 1994 was never released. Would you have preferred the same thing happen to Captain America? **

Matt Salinger: [Pauses] I’ve never thought of that. I don’t know. I just wish we had been able to make the film the film it could have been. Am I bitter? Not at all; it was fun and not that many people get to play a superhero. And now it’s sort of a kitschy kind of cool thing to have done. If I took myself super seriously...it’s not like you do a film version of Macbeth and it doesn’t work and you’re trying for something super dramatic and classical. This was a comic book movie...I can’t decide. Part of me thinks if it hadn’t come out then people would have been wondering what happened. At least this way they got to see, "OK, here’s what they did. Here’s what worked; here’s what didn’t work." Maybe future superhero movies were a little bit better because of the mistakes that were made.

**GQ: For someone who wants to watch the 1990 version, what would you tell them? **

Matt Salinger: [Laughing] Um? Well, the personal legacy of this movie is it was one example of several that showed me how powerless actors were to make a movie good or not. It was one of the beginnings of my stepping out of acting and stepping into producing. As a career, it became clear to me that it was going to be entirely too frustrating. That’s the personal legacy, for somebody thinking, "Should I check this out?" Yeah, you should check it out. You can see how far technology has wrought the movie business—especially for movies like superhero movies where there’s a lot of action and a lot of special effects. Look, could you have made Harry Potter 25 years ago? No. Certainly not the way it is now. You should see it as a before and after kind of thing—that’s assuming this one is as good as it looks.