Before glimpsing a single paycheck, every actor dreams of being christened “a rising star.” It’s a universally acknowledged stamp of industry approval, and more often than not, a prelude to big money. But for Luke Evans, whose star is undoubtedly rocketing skyward, the label is losing its luster. “I’m wondering how long it’s going to last,” says the 32-year-old Welsh actor, “because I find it quite funny. How long can you stay ‘rising’?”
In Evans’ case, not much longer. For starters, he has been working since his early twenties, leading the 2002 West End production of Boy George’s musical, Taboo. He’d eclipsed 30 when he scored his first film audition, thanks to casting directors who took notice of his focused and sensitive performance in Peter Gill’s Donmar Warehouse production of Small Change. “It wasn’t me searching out movies, it just sort of happened,” Evans recalls. “I was very content working in the theater. It’s where I learnt my craft.”
Then, quite suddenly, he morphed into an action star. In October, he appeared as Aramis, one of the titular swashbucklers in Paul W. S. Anderson’s chop-socky thriller The Three Musketeers, and three weeks later, as a vengeful Zeus in Tarsem Singh’s phantasmagorical myth redux, Immortals. This March, he’ll travel as inspector Emmett Fields to 19th-century Baltimore, where he’ll help John Cusack’s Edgar Allan Poe track a serial killer in -The Raven. “I’m not quite sure how it happened, to be honest,” Evans says of his macho screen personas. “I never thought this Welsh boy who liked to sing would end up doing action roles.”
Over the next year, he will jet back and forth to New Zealand, where Peter Jackson is shooting consecutive films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Evans will play Bard the Bowman, the eagle-eyed archer. The last time Jackson put a bow and arrow into the hands of a dashing young Brit, the Brit became the global star known as Orlando Bloom. Is Evans worried that The Hobbit will wipe out what remains of his anonymity? “My saving grace is that I live in London,” he says, “where people don’t really give a fuck.” —Ben Barna. Photo by Iain McKell.
http://www.blackbookmag.com/movies/next-year-s-best-brightest-in-movies-music-art-more-1.42793
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