The speculation regarding the sexuality of West-London-theatre-star-come-Hollywood-heartthrob Luke Evans – whose latest, The Three Musketeers and Immortals, hit screens this fall – continues to blaze. Is he gay? Straight? Bisexual?The scandal was ignited a few weeks back, when Evans’ Wikipedia page underwent some sudden remodelling in the wake of an is-he-or-isn’t-he story afterelton.com’s Michael Jensen was researching.
Jensen began digging when a reader pointed out two potentially disparate online nuggets: a candidly homo 2002 interview that Evans – then 23 – did with The Advocate during a run in Boy George’s lauded hit musical Taboo, and a series of 2010 gossip roundups in Wales Online and Daily Mail linking the rising film star to PR exec Holly Goodchild: “Luke’s lovely – we’re really old friends and it just sort of happened.”
Jensen foraged the net for confirmation of an Evans-Goodchild coupling but found none. In fact, Evans’ Wikipedia page declared, “Luke Evans is openly gay” (citing The Advocate interview).
So Jensen contacted Evans’ handlers and, while waiting on a response, discovered that Evans’ Wikipedia profile had been rashly modified:
“Luke lives a private life and rarely speaks about his personal life. He has made it clear in the past that press and private life are very seperate [sic] and should never be mixed. There has been interest in an interview he did in 2002, while starring in Taboo, [sic] Evans was interviewed by The Advocate and spoke about his personal life. In the article Evans stated, ‘I knew that even though my part was a straight character everybody knew me as a gay man, and in my life in London I never tried to hide it… So I thought, Well, I’m going to have to be open. It’s who I am. And if people don’t like it, then I don’t want their jobs.’[3] In the last 10 years Luke Evans [sic] stance has always been to remain quietly dignified and focus solely on his career, family and friends which are incredibly important to him.”
Evans has never publicly asserted any such privacy claims – quite the opposite.
As he told The Advocate, “I’ve never been a very good liar… If that means I’m going to be a poor man at 60, then at least I’ve lived a happy, open, gay life and not had to hide it from anybody… As far as I’m concerned it’s not a big issue. You come out, that’s it, the end… [W]hether I’m successful or [not], at least I’ll never have that skeleton in the closet they can rattle out.”
And in 2004, Evans told gaydarnation.com about his stockpile of gay porn: “I bought my first film when I was 15, and now I have a good collection and I add to it regularly. I research it almost every night.” His pornstar preference? “An enormous big fat cock.”
Further, he told gay weekly QX in 2004 that being out “hasn’t bothered [his] career at all.”
Evans’ PR people, however, seem to think otherwise. Over the course of Jensen’s investigation, Evans’ Wikipedia profile was altered yet again. “Personal Life” was removed altogether, profile on lockdown, and Jensen was given the brush-off: “I do not comment on my client’s [sic] personal lives in the media,” wrote Evans’ management. “As for Luke, he did so once, a long time ago when he was an inexperienced, young actor, and now with maturity and hindsight, he has learned not to engage the press in his personal life again.”
After this story broke, Evans’ Wikipedia profile was modified again. It now reads: “During his early career Evans openly identified as gay. In a 2002 interview he said ‘[E]verybody knew me as a gay man, and in my life in London I never tried to hide it’ and that by being open he wouldn’t have ‘that skeleton in the closet they can rattle out.’ In 2004 he said that his acting career had not suffered by being out. In September 2010, Evans was romantically linked with a woman.”
While gossip blogs alternately hurl jabs – Traitor! You can’t go back in the closet! – and entertain conspiracy theories – Straight-washing! Goodchild is a beard! – one thing is certain: Evans has radically interrupted the relentlessly hetero-macho terrain of the action genre, not to mention the straight and narrow sphere of blockbuster superstardom itself.
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