Rick & Morty almost cast Chris Evans for season 5. The Adult Swim show premiered its new season in June, with guest voices already including Jim Gaffigan, Alison Brie, and Timothy Olyphant. Celebrities all around have shown off their fandom for the show on social media, occasionally resulting in a casting opportunity. Some have come in as new characters and aliens, like Stephen Colbert or John Oliver, and some have come in for self-promotional parodies of themselves, like Elon Musk.
Evans, most recognizable as the former Captain America until he hung up the shield in Endgame, has long been a fan of Rick & Morty. With regular tweets celebrating the show, many thought Evans would appear in season 4, though that ultimately never came to fruition. As viewers have noted, nearly every episode containing its celebrity guest gives the show an excellent opportunity to pluck from its star-studded fanbase, which has been seemingly endless.
Rick & Morty producer Scott Marder says Chris Evans was almost in season 5 during an interview with Monsters & Critics. There was an unspecified character that Evans was theoretically eligible to play, and the producers "danced around" casting Evans but ultimately put it towards a yet unknown actor. Regardless, Marder called himself "a big comic book nerd" and acknowledged that putting a Marvel figure into the show would be of great interest to him. Most of the time, the producer said that casting guest stars has been a fluid and straightforward process:
Most of them are [fans]. Sometimes we hear people are just fans. Other times, we’ve got a great casting department, and a lot of times they’re just on the ball and offering up the perfect people for those roles. It’s normally pretty organic. Thankfully, this show is so huge that it’s normally pretty quick to get an answer from people... on stuff which makes our lives easier.
With the heavy demands that being a superhero has on an actor's schedule, it's understanding why current MCU leaders like Anthony Mackie or Brie Larson haven't been doing as much film and TV work outside their MCU duties. But now that Captain America has passed the torch, the possibility for Evans to be more open in season 6 becomes more likely. While Morty hasn't had an Avenger on board, MODOK's Patton Oswalt and Thor: Ragnarok's Taika Waititi have both voiced roles on the show. As of now, Evans's upcoming projects have grown to include Pixar's Lightyear, the Russos' The Gray Man, and Adam McKay's Don't Look Up.
Given the show contains an Avengers parody ("The Vindicators"), the opportunity to use Evans to spoof the franchise would be akin to It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia famously using The Office actor Oscar Nunez to mock more "palatable" sitcoms. Rick & Morty's off-kilter edge would've been more armed at punching up at Marvel -- the highest-grossing franchise of all time -- with its posterchild, Evans, as the fist. Instead, fans would need to wait another season for another opportunity at the real Captain America on The Vindicators, or perhaps as a whole new character unrelated to Marvel. After all, as Evans said he was finished with Steve Rogers, he may even be referring to spoofs.
Source: Monsters & Critics