Luke Evans
The handsome fantasy man—from Hobbit bowman to Gaston
The 37-year-old Welsh actor Luke Evans might be mistaken for Orlando Bloom, especially when he was playing Bard the Bowman in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, but that’s not what makes him so cast-able in movies. Evans is theater-trained and a West End veteran, yet he looks like an adonis in a Speedo (FYI, girls, he’s openly gay) and has an air of mystery about him: he can play good guys and heavies with equal aplomb. He played the tormented husband of the missing woman in the recent thriller, The Girl on the Train, and the nasty mercenary Owen Shaw in a few of the later Fast and Furious movies. He seems a glove fit for the upcoming Beauty and the Beast movie musical, playing the vainglorious Gaston. Yet he auditioned for the part with Oscar-winning director Bill Condon. “When you audition for something you do feel a little bit more legit,” Evans told Interview recently. “It’s a validation that you are the right person for the job. I loved every second of doing Beauty and the Beast. It was thrilling. You just felt like you were on a big MGM set of a musical. I can’t wait to see the final cut.”
