Luke Evans
(Picture: handout)Since my conversation with the ever-rising Hollywood star and singer Luke Evans, his home team of Wales has crashed out of the World Cup, but when we speak, it’s just a day after the team and their supporters were banned from wearing rainbow bucket hats in Qatar.
“It makes me angry on so many levels,” says the actor, who is out as gay and was crowned Attitude magazine’s Man of the Year in 2020. “Fifa have been so cowardly about it. To give a platform to that kind of ignorance is sad and shocking.”
Evans has always been open about his sexuality, having left home at 16 to move to Cardiff in order to live more freely. He has a partner, with whom was snapped holidaying in the summer, but is fiercely protective of his private life, saying previously: “It was the last thing I had, because everything else I’ve given to the world. My career was public, I was photographed, and all that stuff. My personal life just became the last thing that I had.”
He has definitely been living in the glare of the public eye over the last few years. He first became known to international audiences as Bard the Bowman in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, starting in 2012, but he got the chance to flex his singing (and comedy) muscles on screen as the villainous Gaston in Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast opposite Emma Watson in 2017. He’s barely stopped for breath since.
“I’m doing an awful lot, and I guess I haven’t even paused to think about it,” he tells me as he sits down at home with a glass of red on Thursday evening (he’s evidently already in the festive mood, gesturing towards the baubles on his Christmas tree: “There are twenty years’ worth of memories here!” he exclaims. Some of them he bought and decorated when he had no money; another is signed by Dionne Warwick).
“I feel like I haven’t stopped in about fifteen years,” he says.
That’s partly because, suddenly, everything has come out at once – “just like a number 73 bus,” Evans jokes. He’s starred in Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers and the Apple TV+ drama Echo 3; wrapped Dan Levy’s Good Grief, in which he plays the American star’s husband; voiced Scrooge in a new animation of A Christmas Carol for Netflix; and released his second album, A Song For You.
He’s loved every minute, but, he concedes, he also has a healthy fear of typecasting. “I want to make sure I never get put in a box,” he says. Little chance of that, you’d think, as he switches from the health-obsessed, mysterious Lars Lee in Nine Perfect Strangers to Bambi, the US special forces soldier who goes to Colombia to find his sister, who is being held hostage in the Venezuelan border jungle, in Echo 3.
Still, regardless of Evans’ chameleonic qualities, there seems to be one character from his career who has left a mark more vividly than any other.
“When I was shooting Echo 3 in Cartagena, I couldn’t go out into the street without someone shouting ‘Owen Shaw!’” the actor laughs. Shaw is, of course, the criminal mastermind and notorious villain of Fast & Furious 6.
Evans finds antagonists to be the most rewarding roles. “They’re a lot of fun,” he admits, “You get to break all the rules.” He’s eager to remind me, though, that the “best bad guys” are those that are “human” and “relatable”. “If you can make people semi-like the bad guy, and question their own moral compass, you’re onto a winner,” he says.
Evans started out in musical theatre, where he first made a name for himself in West End productions of Rent, Miss Saigon, and Piaf. He nearly made a return to the stage this autumn, he tells me, tantalisingly, but scheduling conflicts prevented it from happening.
However, the setback has filled him with fresh energy. “I want to originate a new role and tell a new story,” he says. “When I get back on stage, I want it to be for something like that; something I can carry, and give my all to.”
Of all the projects he’s turned a hand to this year, it’s the album he’s itching to tell me about. Born in Pontypool, he grew up in the valleys of South Wales, and “music was my first love,” he says. But he was badly bullied at school (he’s described himself in the past as “an easy target”) and didn’t see things through to A-Levels. “I left school at sixteen, got a job and started paying for my own singing lessons,” he says.
A Song For You is a curation of covers for people who want to get in the Christmas spirit with a soundtrack that goes beyond the festive classics – though Silent Night and Last Christmas are welcome inclusions. As with Evans’ previous album, At Last (2019), on which he gravitated time and again to songs originally sung by female artists, A Song For You puts a new spin on a selection of timeless ballads.
It’s also home to some surprising collaborations – Say Something with Nicole Kidman, and Come What May with Charlotte Church. “I was very nervous about asking them both,” Evans admits, “but when I did they not only said yes but jumped at the chance!”
Evans and Kidman met on the set of Nine Perfect Strangers, in the Oscar-winning actress’ homeland of Australia. During the show’s wrap, Evans was invited to Kidman and Keith Urban’s house for dinner, kindling a natural spark between the actors as they harmonised by the piano. Even on the duet with Charlotte Church, Kidman’s presence looms: Come What May was first sung by her and Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge (2001).
The new album also sees Evans break new ground with two of his own songs, alongside classics like My Way and Bridge Over Troubled Water. “I’ve written poetry and rhyming stories but never had the courage or know-how to put it into a song,” Evans recently said. Working with songwriter Amy Wodge, an Ed Sheeran collaborator, he overcame his fear and the result is two stunning new tracks, Horizons Blue and Busy Breaking Yours.
It’s the duets he’s most excited about though, even if it took courage to ask for them. “Don’t sit and think about what ifs,” Evans tells me: the possibility that someone might say yes is always worth risking a no. They are among the album’s most special songs, he says. “There’s something about doing [them] in the studio with the headphones on that allows you to capture every single nuance of their voice and your own.”
Other highlights include the opening track, recorded live with the orchestra in the studio – a rarity – and Calon Lân, a traditional Welsh hymn which Evans has been singing since he was a child. His version has a glorious spiritual backdrop courtesy of a Welsh male voice choir.
“I’m very proud of my country,” Evans smiles, his lilting accent evident. “There’s not a lot of us and yet we’ve managed to rise to the top in so many fields. I’m happy to be given the chance to bring Wales to people who don’t know it.”
As Evans looks forward to Christmas with his family, he seems happy to take a pause from new projects and return to the roles that mean the most to him: a Welshman, a son, and a partner.
