Early Roles Of Marvel Stars

The stars of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are probably the closest thing our generation will see to golden age Hollywood royalty. Instantly recognizable and synonymous with the modern pop culture deities they portray, these winners of the show business lottery are probably as famous in our world as the superheroes they portray are in theirs.

The thing is, even Tony Stark probably has that guy he went to middle school with who points at the screen every time Iron Man is on TV and tells everyone at the bar about the time he watched the financier of the Avengers spill La Croix on his pants in front of the whole cafeteria. Everyone has old stories about the person they used to be, a lot of them are embarrassing, and someone usually remembers. In the case of Marvel's movie stars, the internet is that guy. And ever since we started transferring VHS to YouTube, nobody's been safe. Here are the early roles of the MCU's biggest stars. Even the ones they wish you'd forget.

She's powerful. She's iconic. She's the MCU's new interstellar tank. Captain Marvel is Marvel's long-awaited tentpole female character, providing a big-screen role model for the films' countless young female fans across the globe. It's seriously, truly inspirational. Also, one time, when she was a kid, she cooked roadkill on TV.

Brie Larson first entered the public consciousness in a big way in 2015 when her role in the drama Room won her an Academy Award for Best Actress. After that, more popcorn-accessible movies like Kong: Skull Island and Captain Marvel made her a household name. But Larson has been performing for decades in various capacities, even releasing a teen pop album in 2005 called "Finally Out of P.E." which sold a remarkable 4,000 copies.

Go a little further back and you'll see her in the 2004 comedy 13 Going On 30 as one of the clique-y tween bullies. Go even further back and find her screen debut: a sketch on The Tonight Show in which she played a kid in an ad for the "Roadkill Easy Bake Oven," a kid-sized kitchen apparatus that ... do we really have to explain the joke? It's fun to watch a young Carol Danvers massacre a dead possum, and even more fun watching her talk about it 20 years later.

Jeremy Renner took the honest route to becoming a superhero: He started college studying criminology. An elective theater class got him into acting, and from there, things, well, definitely took a while.

Renner's first onscreen role was in 1995's National Lampoon's Senior Trip, a movie with the tagline "Four Score And Seven Beers Ago" and the critical reception to match. The next 15 years were a mishmash of TV guest spots until he played Jeffrey Dahmer in 2002 and started catching people's attention. He especially caught the eye of Kathryn Bigelow, who would later direct him in his Academy Award-nominated part in The Hurt Locker.

It's that chunk of in-between years that's fascinating. Renner was doing fine despite not being a movie star — he's run a remarkably successful home renovation company on the side since 2001. But he also took an astonishing number of acting gigs that might surprise you. Seven years prior to his first stint trying to shoot a Norse god with a bow and arrow in 2011's Thor, he was trying to take down Catwoman, doing the voice work for some of the cops in the video game adaptation of the Halle Berry movie.

Scarlett Johansson has become the kind of success that sort of blends into the landscape like a skyscraper — so enormous and overwhelming that it's hard to remember a time when she wasn't there.

The cultural goliath that is ScarJo got started early. She studied acting as a child at the Professional Children's School, a private academy focused on educating aspiring young performers. When she was 9, Johansson scored her first movie role. She played the daughter of John Ritter in Rob Reiner's North, a movie that's now almost entirely remembered for being just the worst, scoring a zero star rating from Roger Ebert, who was generous enough to give Battlefield Earth half a star if that tells you anything.

Clearly, none of this deterred Johansson, and she kept plowing through child acting roles like a champ. Parts in Home Alone 3 and The Horse Whisperer eventually transitioned into critically acclaimed movies like Lost in Translation and Girl With A Pearl Earring, and 15 years later she was the highest paid actress in Hollywood.

It is worth pointing out, though, that at one point, she played Sean Connery's late-in-life kid in the 1995 thriller Just Cause. The point is, being the daughter of sometimes-James Bond means she came by the whole "action espionage" thing honestly, and gives us a better origin story to Black Widow than a prequel ever could.

Chris Evans is a pedigreed comic book actor by now. Before he was brought into the MCU, he had been in the film adaptations of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, 2010's The Losers based on the Vertigo Comics series of the same name and, lest we forget, played the snowboarding, wisecracking, on-flaming Johnny Storm in the just-this-side-of-Batman-And-Robin pair of Fantastic Four movies from 2005 and 2007.

But none of these parts exhibited Evans' bravery quite like his first appearance in an environmental educational video from 1997. It's not his character's interest in maintaining a healthy ecosystem that displays his innate heroism, nor is it his clear passion for stemming the pollution of the local river. It's the way that he, with no regard for his own safety, jumps on the metaphorical grenade known as "shamelessly rocking a heavy mallrat aesthetic."

It couldn't have been easy for Captain America, being frozen in ice for 70 years. Still, there are harder things to live through, like being immortalized in stunner '90s fashion on VHS.

Rocket and Ant-Man are sort of opposite sides of the same coin. They're two of the MCU's most adorable characters. One is basically a living stuffed animal. The other is a raccoon.

Rocket is voiced by Bradley Cooper, most recently noted for sitting inside of Lady Gaga's personal-space bubble at the Oscars. He's been a Hollywood staple since the late 2000s when The Hangover franchise put him in the spotlight. Paul Rudd, of course, is Ant-Man, and has been on America's radar since he introduced us to Sex Panther cologne in 2004's Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. And if you blinked, you might have missed the first time the two of them teamed up.

Fans of cult classics already know that Rudd and Cooper appeared together in 2001's Wet Hot American Summer, an indie movie from David Wain, an alum of The State behind beloved comedies like Role Models and They Came Together. The film was a human zoo of comedic talent that hadn't quite been recognized at the time, with Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks, and H. Jon Benjamin all involved pre-meteoric success. Check it out to see Rudd throwing history's greatest tantrum over having to pick up his cafeteria tray and a still-baby-faced Bradley Cooper in his first movie role getting way closer to Michael Ian Black than he ever did to Lady Gaga. Bonus: Both actors returned for the Netflix prequel series 14 years later.

If you've seen Avengers: Endgame, you know there are some things that even the Infinity Gauntlet can't bring back. For better or worse, one of those things seems to be the Netflix branch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sadly, it's unlikely that we'll be seeing folks like Jon Bernthal's Punisher again, but at least we can look back on their early catalogue of work and imagine the Frank Castle/Barney Stinson team-up that could've been.

Living comfortably between the categories of "blink and you'll miss it" and "impossible to unsee" is one of Bernthal's first acting gigs. He hadn't yet bashed a single zombie on The Walking Dead. He hadn't even cut his hair. But keep an eye open during the Season 1 episode of How I Met Your Mother titled "The Purple Giraffe" and you'll see a decidedly non-militant Frank Castle delivering one line with a definite air of stoner comedy about him.