By Celia Walden
11:30AM BST 22 Sep 2014
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 script.’
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.’
READ MORE HERE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/11109078/Luke-Evans-interview-Im-not-Robert-Pattinson.html
