Luke Evans is the Welsh movie star who recently played Gaston in the smash hit remake of Beauty and the Beast, and during a round of interviews that he did in relation to that movie, he did an interview with a publication called The Jackal Magazine. During that interview, Evans claimed that his personal life hasn’t affected his acting career as it has grown over the years. Evans is a gay man who has reportedly been out of the closet for quite some time, yet no one seems to realize it.
Evans was interviewed by the publication from the United Kingdom to promote Beauty and the Beast, and he said that talent and what happens in someone’s personal life shouldn’t have any effect on one another. The interviewer asked if Evans thought the movie industry was prepared to accept an action hero who is gay, and Evans responded by saying that he probably wouldn’t be an actor if he felt his personal life affected his career.
Of course, many who either saw the interview live or read the transcript were flabbergasted to learn that Evans is a gay man. The interviewer called Evans ‘openly gay’, and the actor didn’t refute that claim, but it is not a well-known fact that Evans has been out of the closet for many years. Users all over Twitter went crazy at the revelation, but the vast majority of them were supportive. Many found themselves asking when and how Evans came out of the closet.
Unfortunately, there is no single straightforward answer to that question. Contributors to Out have confirmed that Luke Evans was once out of the closet, but they claim he has essentially put himself back in the closet in order to deal with his growing fame. When Evans first entered the acting world in the early 2000s, he was open and extremely honest about his lifestyle. In 2002, he was cast in a musical called Taboo that was written by Boy George, and during that time he did an interview with The Advocate where he discussed his lifestyle. At the time, Evans was a fairly unknown actor, but as time went on and he started getting more mainstream roles, the openness that Evans once portrayed started to vanish. He received roles in both Immortals and Clash of the Titans, and around that time his Wikipedia page was suspiciously cleaned of anything that discussed his lifestyle
Evans also apparently has a powerful publicity team that has kept the vast majority of his personal life a secret over the years, so it is no surprise that most of his fans had no idea he was gay. What is strange is that the actor would claim that being gay didn’t affect his career, despite the fact that he apparently went to great lengths to shield that fact from the public once he found mainstream fame. Of course his being gay didn’t affect his career, because no one knew about it.
Some have claimed that Evans was merely sidestepping the issue by not discussing it openly in the recent years since his fame skyrocketed. Perhaps he believed that being open about his sexuality would lead to discrimination against him, even if that discrimination only took the form of him failing to receive parts in action or adventure movies. If Evans himself didn’t feel that way, it is possible someone advised him to keep his lifestyle a secret for the sake of his career.
In any event, it no longer matters why he kept it a secret, because the secret is out now. Technically speaking, the secret has been out for years, but it was only recently that the secret caught up with the mainstream popularity of the budding movie star.