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Luke Evans interview: 'I'm not Robert Pattinson'
In Dracula Untold the Welsh actor takes on the role of Vlad The Impaler. The film, he says, is a chance for audiences to reassess the vampire's reputation - while cementing his credentials as the 'go-to period-action guy'
In the expert tones of a master sommelier, Luke Evans is describing what fake blood tastes like. ‘Most of it is very sweet and glucosey. Earlier this year I drank one with a very strong liquorice flavour. Then last year I drank some which was a mixture of cherry juice and beetroot juice. Now I’m filming a new movie where I’m covered in blood again,’ he grins, ‘and I can’t even remember seeing that in the sсript.’
In the past five years the 35-year-old Welshman has starred in such gore-fests as Clash of the Titans, Robin Hood and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug – and in doing so has become, in the words of one US casting director, ‘the go-to period-action guy’ – a niche that will be further confirmed when his new film, Dracula Untold, in which Evans plays Vlad the Impaler, is released next month.
Set within a historical rather than a fantastical context, Dracula Untold strives to explain Vlad III’s beginnings in the early 1400s, before going on to chart his bloodthirsty rule in the old Romanian state of Walachia. ‘The film is about the transition Vlad made on a human level, after being taken captive by the Ottoman court and reared as a child by his father’s enemy, the first sultan,’ Evans says. ‘There he trained as a Turkish warrior, and learnt the gruesome torture techniques he went on to use against them as an adult.’
The nickname ‘Tepes’, or ‘Impaler’ – coined after Vlad’s favourite method of execution – was only attached posthumously, he explains. ‘And actually I don’t think he was born evil. So the idea is to make him if not likeable then at least understandable.’
It helps set the film apart from lesser Dracula vehicles that Evans doesn’t look like a boy-band member. ‘I’m not Robert Pattinson,’ he tells me, slouched in a low chair in the rambling back garden of our shoot locale in Greenwich, London. That much is obvious. With only three buttons of his Hilfiger checked shirt done up, his long black hair slick with product and a handlebar moustache (grown for a new film role in High Rise, based on a JG Ballard novel and directed by Ben Wheatley) adorning his top lip, Evans today looks more like a 1970s porn star – or Orlando Bloom after a heavy night out.
‘I get Orlando a lot,’ he nods, lighting up the first of several Marlboros. ‘We often get mistaken for each other. Recently we appeared at Comic-Con together and Orlando looked at me and said, “Dude – this is just weird! We could be brothers.” It’s a compliment for me, of course.’
Maybe so, but there’s something harder, grittier and sexier about Evans that differentiates him from his fresh-faced Hollywood counterparts. ‘Seven years ago there was a big Twilight “pretty-boy” thing going on and I remember the casting agents saying, “We’ve been looking for men and you look like a man and you carry yourself like a man.” I guess there was a space in the market at that point for a 30-year-old [male] and I filled it.’
Coming off the back of a decade of West End musicals – during which time he starred in Taboo, Rent and Miss Saigon – Evans’s breakthrough into dramatic theatre and then film wasn’t only a surprise to him but also an enormous relief. ‘I thought that was going to be my career,’ he says. ‘Then, when I was 28, this play came up at the Donmar – Small Change – about two Welsh boys. So I sent the casting director a note, begging him to see me – and I got the job. I’d been itching for a long time to do a drama with no singing involved, so that was a pivotal moment.’
By the time Small Change closed, two big agents had flown in from LA hoping to sign Evans and he had dined at the Ivy twice.
For the Pontypool-born only child of a bricklayer and a cleaner – both Jehovah’s Witnesses – brought up on a diet of church music, Petula Clark and the Drifters, singing had always seemed the obvious career choice. ‘I was bullied at school so I didn’t much like it. But at home I would sing along to my dad’s 45s and when people came over they seemed to like listening to me. Then in my last year this supply teacher put me in touch with a singing coach called Louise Ryan and I ended up taking singing classes with her, along with Charlotte Church, who always used to turn up just after me.’
In 1997 Evans won a scholarship to the London Studio Centre. ‘As much as my parents were worried about me moving to London at 17,’ he says, ‘they could see that I was hungry to find my path. And it probably helped that they saw me succeeding at it, slowly but surely,’ he says of his small first role, in the musical La Cava, in 2000.
A shy boy who was never, he insists, ‘a natural show-off’, Evans had to adapt fast to his new film career once the US took an interest. He auditioned for the 2009 film adaptation of Dorian Gray, but it wasn’t until the following year that he won his first Hollywood role, playing Apollo in another remake, Clash of the Titans.
‘The first time I was flown to LA for a screen test was an incredibly nerve-racking experience. I’d never turned left on a plane in my life and I didn’t have any clue what to expect when I got there.’ Whatever Evans had imagined wasn’t what he found. ‘I couldn’t drive so I just walked to and from the Starbucks on the corner every day,’ he says. ‘I didn’t enjoy the experience.’
Now that he has learnt to drive he finds LA a less soulless place to visit, but any plans to leave London are dismissed out of hand. ‘I mean today,’ he says, turning his face to the sun and letting his eyes fall shut behind his Bulgari shades, ‘I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else than sitting in this lovely garden, next to the Thames, talking to you.’
Many a British actor has talked a good game before giving in to the lure of LA, but something tells me that Evans won’t be one of them. He has just had his east London flat redecorated, and is still mulling over where to display the weaponry he has collected from his films (‘I’ve got Aramis’s weapons from The Three Musketeers and swords belonging to Bard the dragon-slayer from The Hobbit and Dracula – they’re a lovely way to remember films by’).
And now that he has had the heating, entertainment system and CCTV connected up to his iPhone, he can control his empire, Bond-villain style, from wherever he is in the world. ‘The other day I caught someone nicking the number 4 off my door,’ he says. ‘Right there on my CCTV is this guy with a hood who gets a screwdriver out of his pocket, calmly unscrews the 4 and walks off.’
A little low-level loucheness doesn’t bother him, and he enjoys the eclectic street style of the neighbourhood. ‘I saw a guy walking down Shoreditch High Street in a straw fedora, and nobody was looking at him thinking, “You look ridiculous.” If you wore that in south Wales you’d have stones thrown at you.’
Evans favours a more classic look himself. ‘I don’t carry off quirky,’ he says. He may now have the likes of Bulgari, Armani and Fendi clamouring to dress him, but the novelty hasn’t quite worn off. ‘The first time I went to the Cannes Film Festival and found a rack of designer suits in my hotel room that my publicist told me were mine to keep, I couldn’t believe it. I still think that’s a pretty great perk – although I won’t be forced to wear anything that I don’t like.’
Asked whether he feels that in a climate where models are increasingly supplanted by actors in fashion campaigns there’s a balance to be struck, Evans is unequivocal. ‘There are examples of actors and actresses who become more famous for being the face of a perfume or a clothing brand than anything else, and you forget about what they actually do for a living. I’m wary of that. I think it’s something you have to monitor closely.’
One of the advantages of becoming famous in your 30s is this ability to view yourself objectively and make judgments both personal and professional accordingly. One of the disadvantages is that any early candour may come back to haunt you. So when Evans decided to out himself at 22 (‘I’m going to have to be open,’ he told The Advocate magazine in 2002. ‘It’s who I am’) he may not have imagined how this would be blown up beneath the magnifying glass of a later celebrity.
‘As I’ve grown up in this business over the past five or six years I’ve realised that there’s very little you can keep private,’ he says now. ‘So I’m protecting the only bit that I have any control over. My private life feels like the last thing I can keep hold of.’ Does he regret being so open early on? ‘I’m very happy with who I am – and so are my family.’
Evans is less reticent on the subject of his atheist beliefs. ‘I don’t think any child should be born into a religion,’ he says vigorously. ‘You should choose your own religion, once you’re old enough to make a decision as important as that. That said, I admire my parents enormously – and their devotion to their faith. They are two of the happiest people I know and I think a lot of that is down to their religion and the simplicity of their everyday lives.’
Evans tries to emulate that pared-down lifestyle. He says it took him four minutes to get ready to meet me today (‘Actually it helps if my hair’s not clean – otherwise I look like I’ve been electrocuted’), and he is keen to avoid joining the growing clique of male actors in their mid-40s having work done. ‘I think that these days men feel the same panic about ageing as women. I don’t know whether it’s their agents who tell them to do things but I do know that my agent wouldn’t dare. In fact I’d tell anyone who tried to tell me to get rid of my frown lines to take a running jump.
'I couldn’t get a job for 10 years,’ he continues, ‘and maybe that had to do with the fact that I didn’t have as many lines as I do now. I’m not changing a thing about this face,’ he chuckles. ‘It’s got me work.’
источник
In Dracula Untold the Welsh actor takes on the role of Vlad The Impaler. The film, he says, is a chance for audiences to reassess the vampire's reputation - while cementing his credentials as the 'go-to period-action guy'
In the expert tones of a master sommelier, Luke Evans is describing what fake blood tastes like. ‘Most of it is very sweet and glucosey. Earlier this year I drank one with a very strong liquorice flavour. Then last year I drank some which was a mixture of cherry juice and beetroot juice. Now I’m filming a new movie where I’m covered in blood again,’ he grins, ‘and I can’t even remember seeing that in the sсript.’
In the past five years the 35-year-old Welshman has starred in such gore-fests as Clash of the Titans, Robin Hood and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug – and in doing so has become, in the words of one US casting director, ‘the go-to period-action guy’ – a niche that will be further confirmed when his new film, Dracula Untold, in which Evans plays Vlad the Impaler, is released next month.
Set within a historical rather than a fantastical context, Dracula Untold strives to explain Vlad III’s beginnings in the early 1400s, before going on to chart his bloodthirsty rule in the old Romanian state of Walachia. ‘The film is about the transition Vlad made on a human level, after being taken captive by the Ottoman court and reared as a child by his father’s enemy, the first sultan,’ Evans says. ‘There he trained as a Turkish warrior, and learnt the gruesome torture techniques he went on to use against them as an adult.’
The nickname ‘Tepes’, or ‘Impaler’ – coined after Vlad’s favourite method of execution – was only attached posthumously, he explains. ‘And actually I don’t think he was born evil. So the idea is to make him if not likeable then at least understandable.’
It helps set the film apart from lesser Dracula vehicles that Evans doesn’t look like a boy-band member. ‘I’m not Robert Pattinson,’ he tells me, slouched in a low chair in the rambling back garden of our shoot locale in Greenwich, London. That much is obvious. With only three buttons of his Hilfiger checked shirt done up, his long black hair slick with product and a handlebar moustache (grown for a new film role in High Rise, based on a JG Ballard novel and directed by Ben Wheatley) adorning his top lip, Evans today looks more like a 1970s porn star – or Orlando Bloom after a heavy night out.
‘I get Orlando a lot,’ he nods, lighting up the first of several Marlboros. ‘We often get mistaken for each other. Recently we appeared at Comic-Con together and Orlando looked at me and said, “Dude – this is just weird! We could be brothers.” It’s a compliment for me, of course.’
Maybe so, but there’s something harder, grittier and sexier about Evans that differentiates him from his fresh-faced Hollywood counterparts. ‘Seven years ago there was a big Twilight “pretty-boy” thing going on and I remember the casting agents saying, “We’ve been looking for men and you look like a man and you carry yourself like a man.” I guess there was a space in the market at that point for a 30-year-old [male] and I filled it.’
Coming off the back of a decade of West End musicals – during which time he starred in Taboo, Rent and Miss Saigon – Evans’s breakthrough into dramatic theatre and then film wasn’t only a surprise to him but also an enormous relief. ‘I thought that was going to be my career,’ he says. ‘Then, when I was 28, this play came up at the Donmar – Small Change – about two Welsh boys. So I sent the casting director a note, begging him to see me – and I got the job. I’d been itching for a long time to do a drama with no singing involved, so that was a pivotal moment.’
By the time Small Change closed, two big agents had flown in from LA hoping to sign Evans and he had dined at the Ivy twice.
For the Pontypool-born only child of a bricklayer and a cleaner – both Jehovah’s Witnesses – brought up on a diet of church music, Petula Clark and the Drifters, singing had always seemed the obvious career choice. ‘I was bullied at school so I didn’t much like it. But at home I would sing along to my dad’s 45s and when people came over they seemed to like listening to me. Then in my last year this supply teacher put me in touch with a singing coach called Louise Ryan and I ended up taking singing classes with her, along with Charlotte Church, who always used to turn up just after me.’
In 1997 Evans won a scholarship to the London Studio Centre. ‘As much as my parents were worried about me moving to London at 17,’ he says, ‘they could see that I was hungry to find my path. And it probably helped that they saw me succeeding at it, slowly but surely,’ he says of his small first role, in the musical La Cava, in 2000.
A shy boy who was never, he insists, ‘a natural show-off’, Evans had to adapt fast to his new film career once the US took an interest. He auditioned for the 2009 film adaptation of Dorian Gray, but it wasn’t until the following year that he won his first Hollywood role, playing Apollo in another remake, Clash of the Titans.
‘The first time I was flown to LA for a screen test was an incredibly nerve-racking experience. I’d never turned left on a plane in my life and I didn’t have any clue what to expect when I got there.’ Whatever Evans had imagined wasn’t what he found. ‘I couldn’t drive so I just walked to and from the Starbucks on the corner every day,’ he says. ‘I didn’t enjoy the experience.’
Now that he has learnt to drive he finds LA a less soulless place to visit, but any plans to leave London are dismissed out of hand. ‘I mean today,’ he says, turning his face to the sun and letting his eyes fall shut behind his Bulgari shades, ‘I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else than sitting in this lovely garden, next to the Thames, talking to you.’
Many a British actor has talked a good game before giving in to the lure of LA, but something tells me that Evans won’t be one of them. He has just had his east London flat redecorated, and is still mulling over where to display the weaponry he has collected from his films (‘I’ve got Aramis’s weapons from The Three Musketeers and swords belonging to Bard the dragon-slayer from The Hobbit and Dracula – they’re a lovely way to remember films by’).
And now that he has had the heating, entertainment system and CCTV connected up to his iPhone, he can control his empire, Bond-villain style, from wherever he is in the world. ‘The other day I caught someone nicking the number 4 off my door,’ he says. ‘Right there on my CCTV is this guy with a hood who gets a screwdriver out of his pocket, calmly unscrews the 4 and walks off.’
A little low-level loucheness doesn’t bother him, and he enjoys the eclectic street style of the neighbourhood. ‘I saw a guy walking down Shoreditch High Street in a straw fedora, and nobody was looking at him thinking, “You look ridiculous.” If you wore that in south Wales you’d have stones thrown at you.’
Evans favours a more classic look himself. ‘I don’t carry off quirky,’ he says. He may now have the likes of Bulgari, Armani and Fendi clamouring to dress him, but the novelty hasn’t quite worn off. ‘The first time I went to the Cannes Film Festival and found a rack of designer suits in my hotel room that my publicist told me were mine to keep, I couldn’t believe it. I still think that’s a pretty great perk – although I won’t be forced to wear anything that I don’t like.’
Asked whether he feels that in a climate where models are increasingly supplanted by actors in fashion campaigns there’s a balance to be struck, Evans is unequivocal. ‘There are examples of actors and actresses who become more famous for being the face of a perfume or a clothing brand than anything else, and you forget about what they actually do for a living. I’m wary of that. I think it’s something you have to monitor closely.’
One of the advantages of becoming famous in your 30s is this ability to view yourself objectively and make judgments both personal and professional accordingly. One of the disadvantages is that any early candour may come back to haunt you. So when Evans decided to out himself at 22 (‘I’m going to have to be open,’ he told The Advocate magazine in 2002. ‘It’s who I am’) he may not have imagined how this would be blown up beneath the magnifying glass of a later celebrity.
‘As I’ve grown up in this business over the past five or six years I’ve realised that there’s very little you can keep private,’ he says now. ‘So I’m protecting the only bit that I have any control over. My private life feels like the last thing I can keep hold of.’ Does he regret being so open early on? ‘I’m very happy with who I am – and so are my family.’
Evans is less reticent on the subject of his atheist beliefs. ‘I don’t think any child should be born into a religion,’ he says vigorously. ‘You should choose your own religion, once you’re old enough to make a decision as important as that. That said, I admire my parents enormously – and their devotion to their faith. They are two of the happiest people I know and I think a lot of that is down to their religion and the simplicity of their everyday lives.’
Evans tries to emulate that pared-down lifestyle. He says it took him four minutes to get ready to meet me today (‘Actually it helps if my hair’s not clean – otherwise I look like I’ve been electrocuted’), and he is keen to avoid joining the growing clique of male actors in their mid-40s having work done. ‘I think that these days men feel the same panic about ageing as women. I don’t know whether it’s their agents who tell them to do things but I do know that my agent wouldn’t dare. In fact I’d tell anyone who tried to tell me to get rid of my frown lines to take a running jump.
'I couldn’t get a job for 10 years,’ he continues, ‘and maybe that had to do with the fact that I didn’t have as many lines as I do now. I’m not changing a thing about this face,’ he chuckles. ‘It’s got me work.’
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