"Captain America starts the movie off in a very vulnerable place," says Anthony Russo, the co-director of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. "This is the first movie where we really catch up to him in modern day. We see what that means to him on a character level to have missed 70 years and woken up and found that nobody from his old life is around anymore."
So to stop him from feeling lonely, the director brothers Anthony and Joe Russo give the shield-wielder a whole army of new friends. Taking the lead from Avengers Assemble, they populate the adventure with numerous characters from the Marvel universe. Scarlett Johansson bites as Black Widow, Anthony Mackie soars as Falcon and Samuel L Jackson, finally given a major storyline of his own, delights as Nick Fury.
“His relation to the other characters is even more important because he has nobody,” Russo adds.
Indeed, it's his old friends who are the problem. The actor Sebastian Stan returns as Bucky Barnes, but having had his memory wiped, he now operates as Russian agent The Winter Soldier. It seems Marvel has a knack for capturing the mood: the Cold War ended decades ago, yet Captain America: The Winter Soldier arrives just as the Crimea crisis has flared.
“He’s a good man, essentially, in a vacuum,” says Chris Evans of the hero he portrays. “He has morals and values and hopefully you can put him anywhere – whether that’s in the 1940s, or the modern era, or whether it’s a period film or a gritty political thriller.”
Some things, though, never change. Jackson, as always, is coolness personified; Mackie only seems to be half-joking when he quips: “My hero is Samuel L Jackson.”
The extra screen time Jackson is afforded is a boon for the sequel. “I’m really glad that we saw more of Nick and what happens with him, how he reacts to situations, but as usual he’s always trying to be three steps ahead,” says Jackson. “And all of a sudden when he finds out he’s been used, it kind of weighs incumbent on him to find out why. As usual, part of that has to do with subterfuge and diversion, even down to fooling and hurting his most trusted compatriot.”
There’s also a lot more of Black Widow. “It’s just sort of hitting her right now that she’s kind of been acting as a sort of gun for hire,” says Johansson. “And in doing that she’s never really made any active choices. The rug has sort of been pulled from under her feet.”
It's the third time Johansson has played the character and rumours are rife that she will soon get her own stand-alone film. "We've thrown the ball around a little bit but nothing is in the works right now," she says, before revealing: "Well you'll get more of Widow's backstory in Avengers 2. She definitely comes from a really dark past."
Joe Russo adds that there is only one man who knows where the franchise is going. “The real secret source is Kevin Feige at Marvel, who is this auteur producer who is quite brilliant at what he does in terms of keeping the interconnectedness of the Marvel films, but also focusing on the movie at hand. He’s very good at not putting any constraints on the movie he is working on because he has the belief that if you’re thinking about the future you’re not going to make the best movie you can right now.”
As for Captain America, the rumour is that the third instalment, scheduled for release in 2015, may see Stan replace Evans as the title character, after Evans revealed in a recent interview that he wants to take a break from acting to concentrate on directing; while Stan has reportedly signed a nine-picture deal. Stan, though, is keeping his cards close to his chest: "I have no idea, man. I mean, I really don't know."
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier is out now in UAE cinemas
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