You may not know the name, but you know the face. With supporting roles in The Hobbit, Fast and Furious, and a star turn in last year’s Dracula Untold, Luke Evans has been standing at the periphery of the spotlight since 2010. But with his recent casting as the villainous Gaston in the live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, opposite Emma Watson, Evans may finally be poised to take his place amongst the heavyweights of Hollywood elite.
Make no mistake, Internet: this humble Welsh thespian is one worth paying attention to.
Evans was born in Pontypool, Wales in 1979, a single child raised by parents David and Yvonne Evans. His formative years were spent in Aberbargoed, a tiny Welsh town nestled snugly within the Rhymney Valley.
Early life was difficult for Evans. David and Yvonne were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the strict tenets of their faith were a cause of both scorn and isolation for Luke throughout his childhood:
“I was often looked at as a leper by kids at school, because I was a Jehovah’s Witness. They didn’t like it – you were ‘weird’. And on Saturday mornings you’d be knocking at their doors. I remember standing there with my mum and dad, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I know whose door this is, and I’ll have to see them on Monday.’ It was terrible.”
These early lessons in rejection helped forge a tenacity Evans would need to endure the slings and arrows that inevitably come from a career in acting. As he explained to The Guardian newspaper in 2013,
“When I didn’t get a job I thought, ‘don’t worry, there’ll be another one.’ I still live by that now. Nothing really fazes me any more.”
Evans had always held the desire to act and sing. At the age of 16 he left his school, his faith and his small town surroundings with the dream of following his passion. He moved to Cardiff and found work in a shoe store, saving 15 quid a week to pay for singing and acting lessons under the tutelage of Louise Ryan, a well-established singing coach. It was Ryan who encouraged Evans to further pursue his dream as a professional actor, sending him to London to compete for and eventually win a scholarship with the London Studio Centre in King’s Cross.
As he told Collider:
“I never even thought that would be an option. You have to have a lot of money to go to college. It’s not cheap. And, I won this scholarship and it paid, and that put me on the right road.”
Not that it would have stopped him anyway. “I didn’t really have a passion for anything else. I felt alive when I read a script and acted out a scene, or sang a song. It was my dream.”
That dream became a little more realised when he graduated the Studio Centre in the year of 2000. But success did not come easily.
For the next eight years Evans put his heart and soul into theatre, working predominantly within the West End of London and featuring in respected plays such as Taboo, Rent, Miss Saigon and the coming-of-age satire Avenue Q.
Evans frequently found himself falling back on the tenacity he learned as a child, supporting himself by any means when his acting career struggled: including a stretch that saw him without acting work for almost a year. “I’ve had some pretty awful jobs that I don’t miss, like working on a nightclub door, or compiling VIP lists at 3am in the morning but sometimes it’s just got to be done,” Evans reported to Wales Online.
His diligence paid off. After eight years on the theatre circuit Evans finally found his big break: playing the sensitive and sexually confused Vincent in Small Change, written and directed by stage veteran Peter Gill.
Evans was nominated for an Evening Standard award for the performance, one of the highest honours in British theatre. But it wasn’t just the critics paying attention. Casting agents from the United States had seen the play, and for the first time in an almost decade-long career, Hollywood had come calling.
It was during a follow up play, Piaf, that Evans was approached by the casting agent who help deliver his first big screen role, playing the Greek God Apollo in 2010’s Clash of the Titans. He was on screen for only twelve seconds, but the blockbuster provided a big enough boost to his CV that studios began paying attention to the Welsh import. Within four days of being cast as Apollo he signed to two other films, Robin Hood and Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll.
In the five years since his debut, Evans has performed in a staggering 16 films, with a diverse character roster that includes the likes of gods, archers, detectives and humble handymen.
The hard work has paid off, with increasingly high profile roles in some of the biggest franchises in movie history: Bard the Bowman in the back two installments of The Hobbit franchise, and a villainous turn as ruthlessly efficient mercenary Owen Shaw in Furious 6.
Hollywood was clearly shaping Evans to be the next big action star. But it wasn’t until 2014 that he found himself in the star role of a franchise, playing the titular antihero in Dracula Untold, an origin story of fiction’s most famous, non-sparkling vampire. Despite mixed reviews, the film managed to gross over 200 million dollars internationally, enough to warrant discussions of a sequel.
If Evans had any intentions of resting on his laurels (or resting at all) after Dracula, he’s not showing it: the Welsh actor has signed on for another five films, all due within the next two years. Despite his success, Evans has managed to remain humble. His working class roots and everyman attitude afford the actor an openness and humility increasingly rare in the celebrity-obsessed Hollywood.
But early in his film career, this wasn’t always the case. For many years Evans dodged questions regarding what was once considered open knowledge: his sexuality.
Evans made no attempt during his theatre career to hide the fact he was gay. In a 2002 interview with gay magazine The Advocate he was more than forthright:
“Everybody knew me as a gay man, and in my life in London I never tried to hide… I knew I was going to have to do interviews with gay magazines; I knew this was going to happen. So I thought, Well, I’m going to have to be open. It’s who I am.”
It wasn’t until his burgeoning career in Hollywood that Evans became more ambiguous with his sexuality. It’s hardly an uncommon practice in an industry with a reputation for being less than tolerable towards the homosexual community: particularly when an actor is being groomed for the sex symbol status that comes with being an action star.
On the advice of his management Evans became more adaptive when discussing his sexuality. In a 2010 interview with Cosmopolitan he refrained from using pronouns when discussing significant others, stating he hoped to adopt three dogs and share them with “someone he loves.” But as his profile has risen in Hollywood, so too has the desire to be more forthright about his sexual status. In an interview with Women’s Wear Daily he was asked how he felt about setting a new precedent as an openly gay action star:
“It’s good for people to look at me and think this guy is doing his thing and enjoying what he’s doing and successful at it and living his life. And that’s what I’m doing and I’m very happy.”
Indeed, it is difficult to think of many major movie stars that identify with being openly gay – let alone one in a genre traditionally identified with the overbearing alpha male stereotype. But true to his nature, Luke Evans has always been one to follow his passion with honesty and conviction. And after fifteen years as a professional actor, he seems poised to take advantage of every opportunity available:
“I’m 34. I’ve been working as an actor since I was 20. It’s time. This is my moment, and I’m ready for it.”
We don’t doubt him. Do you?
