In a recent interview with The Jackal Magazine, Welsh Beauty and the Beast star Luke Evans talked a little about how he doesn't think being a gay man has been a roadblock to his continually blossoming acting career.
"Talent, success, what you do in your personal life – I don’t see how one should have an effect on the other," Evans said when asked by the UK publication if the movie business was ready for the idea of a gay action hero. "I don’t think I’d be in this business if I felt that I was not being employed because of who I am in my personal life."
Now, if you're anything like us (and these Twitter users), after reading the interview, you had one big question on your mind: since when has Luke Evans been, in the words of The Jackal interview, "openly gay?"
The answer to that question is kind of complicated. As our friends at Out pointed out, the Gaston actor has been in and out of the closet for years. He started his career in the early 2000's being very candid about his sexuality, and even talked to The Advocate about it in a Q & A after he was cast in the Boy George musical Taboo in 2002. But fast forward to 2011, when the actor started getting more mainstream, big budget roles in projects like Clash of the Titans and Immortals, and suddenly, all traces of being "openly gay" were scrubbed from Evans' Wikipedia page. Combine that with the fact that details of his personal life were kept under lock and key by his publicity team for years, and it's no wonder why so many people don't know the actor was part of the LGBT community.
While we're always happy to have more queer visibility in the entertainment industry (because goodness knows we still really need it), and while it's perfectly within someone's rights to not broadcast their sexuality to the world, it's odd to see Luke Evans talk about how he doesn't think being gay hurt his ability to nab big acting jobs.
Why did he and his team side step the topic of sexuality for so many years then?
Luke Evans may have, on a technicality, been out of the closet for a long time, but has he been the visible queer figure that the community at large could use? Definitely not.
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