Luke Evans is Not 'Scared' of a Challenge

"All avenues are being covered this year."

Luke Evans is closing out 2022 with not one, not two, but three big projects. "All avenues are being covered this year." First, there was his nearly unrecognizable turn as the Coachman in Disney's live-action remake Pinocchio back in September. Next, he plays a brother on a mission to save his kidnapped sister in Echo 3 on Apple TV+ (November 23). "It's a really sweeping story." And finally, he'll voice Ebenezer Scrooge in the animated musical Scrooge: A Christmas Carol (December 2). "I've got an album coming out, too" [A Song For You, November 4]. OK, make that four big projects. "For me, it's a joy to be able to be given those platforms to present my abilities. I relish every time I get a chance to do something different. I'm in this business to learn." Despite his movie-star good looks, Evans is eager to be challenged, and his diverse roles in 2022 show that. "I am playing leading men in many things coming up, but I'm not scared of not taking that role and doing something that will challenge me and thrill the audience as well."

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You have so many things coming out this Fall and Winter, and every genre too! With Pinocchio for the family, Echo 3 for the adults and Scrooge: A Christmas Carol for the Christmas movie folks.

I'm just covering it all. All avenues are being covered this year. So it worked out quite well. I just hope everybody likes it. And I've got an album coming out, too.

Oh wow! I want to know more about that. But before we get to that, I need to know about Echo 3, because it looks insanely good. What about it excited you?

It's hard to describe it without really missing things, because it's a really sweeping story. It starts off about a soldier, a decorated war hero, special operative, whose sister is a scientist who goes to the Colombian jungle to do research. She happens to have just married a soldier from my unit, who is a very close friend of mine as well. We're all very different as human beings but we have a common thread, which is that we love each other. Anyway, she gets kidnapped, and me and her husband decide we're gonna go find her. The canvas is a geopolitical military-based thriller about a hostage who we try and exfiltrate. But the process of doing that alone without the help of the government or support means that we use all our training and our capabilities as the most highly trained soldier on the planet to find her. And it's not easy. We shot for 10 months [in Colombia], shot 10 episodes of this sweeping drama and the creatives of the show really didn't look at it as a 10-part episodic drama, it's a sweeping 10-hour movie. That's how it feels and that's how it looks and that's how we wanted it to feel. There's no stop/start. End of episodes beginning of the next one. I defy you not to watch at least five episodes when it first comes out.

Well, if my sister were kidnapped by a foreign government, I'd probably be like, "Don't send me, send Luke Evans."

Right now I probably would be the best person to send.

You'd be great. You could sing to them!

Oh, totally. I could sing to them. I could speak my little bit of Spanish.

That's just it though. Like I wouldn't relate to this character at all, I'm an indoor person. So how do you find something relatable in a character so different from you?

Well, the reason why this story is relatable is because the crux of the story is about three human beings who love each other, are accepting the failings of each other and what you will go through to save another one's life. There's a lot of revelations, there is history, there's lies, there's secrets, there's hurt, there's pain. But there's also sacrifice. There's also what you will do for another person and what you will accept of another person, when you find out things about that person that you didn't know and you felt that they should have known. And so it comes down to three human beings who are fighting for each other and will go through hell and high water to survive it and to find each other. But, you know, we're not very complicated creatures, human beings, and these humans come with their own baggage. And the backdrop of Colombia, the geopolitical situation in Colombia and the United States, that situation has been going on for decades, decades. It is a very complex situation. Mark Boal, this incredible writer who has done incredible stuff like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark 30, he knows this world inside and out. So the authenticity of the dialogue and the characters and the journey and the military aspect of it, it's spot on. And we felt that every step of the way, we needed to keep it as real as possible.

Moving now to Pinocchio, what a wild turn for you. You're so musical, which is something we here in the States haven't really seen you do that much.

It's true. And, to be honest with you, I think that's why I wanted to do this role. Robert Zemeckis said come back to me with an idea of what you think he should be. And that was the best gift ever. I don't know any other actor who's ever been lucky enough to play Disney villains in two live-action remakes of two of Disney's most famous animations [the other being Beauty and the Beast]. So that in itself is a responsibility. But the main responsibility that I had, and the challenge I had was that he cannot be anything like Gaston. I don't want him to look, sound, feel, walk, sing, nothing can be like Gaston. So that was where we started and what we ended up with was this toothless, greasy, monstrous freak of nature that picks up children in the middle of the night and takes them to Pleasure Island. He couldn't be more different than Gaston in so many ways. But this guy, even though the kids don't realize his agenda, his motives are horrific. But it was an absolute joy—and then to sing this new music that was written by the composers! A brilliant song and I was able to change some of the notes so I could really belt out this top number and just bring this thrilling energy to what is, at the moment when this scene happens, it's like fireworks, an explosion of energy, life and music.

I was surprised by your range. I was expecting kind of what I heard you do with Gaston, but you hit the high notes.

I just think sometimes, given the right music, given the right opportunity with the right song, and given the license to the freedom to make it your own, sometimes you get the opportunity to go, "Okay, I love what you've written, but what if I went up to a top D here. Let me just sing it to you." And that's what I did. On a zoom. I went up here. And they were like, "Oh my God. Can you do that? Let's do that." That's sort of what I did. I do have this sort of secretly very high notes, which I don't often get to use. But this was a song I could, and it worked very well with the character.

Do you love playing villains?

I'm a big teddy bear. Kids love me usually and I'm just a very happy person. I'm more fluff but give me some rotten teeth and a filthy wig, and I am ready to go. Give me a tank or a machine gun, I can use them. It's a prop and I'll make the most of the prop.

It is surprising that you're clearly a leading man type, and you play those roles, but you also go deep into character roles. Your resume is very diverse. Do you do that intentionally?

I absolutely do. It's great playing the leader. That's all fun. The challenges are often not left to the leading man in a story. The unconventional trajectories are often left to the other characters within a story. And the more challenging roles I've discovered in the last few years have not been the leading man. I can play a leading man and I am playing leading men in many things coming up, but I'm not scared of not taking that role and doing something that will challenge me and thrill the audience as well. I want people to go "Oh my god, one minute you're a Delta Force Special operative soldier from the U.S. Army in a 10-hour episode series on Apple TV, and the next minute you're jumping over kids and turning kids into donkeys and singing, and then the next minute you've got an album coming out." For me, it's a joy to be able to be given those platforms to present my abilities. I relish every time I get a chance to do something different. I'm in this business to learn. I'm always learning. And the way you learn is doing different things all the time, different accents, different characters, different stories, big movies, little movies, regional television, British television, or big TV shows that go around the world. I want to look back and just go, that's a really interesting career.

So the other plot twist you have this year is you're voicing the character of Ebenezer Scrooge in Scrooge: A Christmas Carol. What makes this version of A Christmas Carol different?

Well, firstly, the music. The album that will come from this film, you will hum these tracks for the rest of your life. I have a love song in the film that is so beautiful. My partner heard it six months ago and he's been singing it ever since. And he's not even musical. He's a project manager in construction. And he literally sings it every other day. The music is phenomenal. What I love about the animation in the film is it's old school, but it's modern. And it totally encapsulates the snowy Christmas, London that everyone has in their head as the idealistic version of it. We've totally gone to that world of Scrooge. I was not expecting to be offered Ebenezer Scrooge, do you know what I mean? I thought I was at least 20 years off from that offer. So firstly, I was like, are they sure they've got the right person? And they said they want to show [me] some imagery and artwork of the look of Scrooge, which I now know is a very different kind of Scrooge than the Scrooge we're used to seeing. And that's exciting in itself. He's very different. He looks very different. He's a little younger, but he's not younger. He's much older than me, but still younger than the Scrooge we are thinking in our heads, Dickens' Scrooge. And the cast they were putting together! Olivia Colman, Jonathan Pryce... I was like who else? And it just kept going. Jessie Buckley! It was wonderful. I started recording the voice in Australia two years ago and then we recorded the music in Abbey Road last year, in the Beatles studio. So it's been an amazing journey, and I'm very excited about it.

Speaking of music, you mentioned your new album with A Song For You!

It's my second album. The first one did really, really well, everybody was very happy with it. And I thought that was it. I thought great, tick that off the bucket list. I wanted to record an album. I've done it. And last year, they came back and they said, we'd like you to record a second album if you're interested. I was like, interested? Are you crazy? It's all the music that people want to hear me sing and a lot of tracks they would never have thought I'd sing, but I'm doing them.

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