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I like Dracula Untold star Luke Evans, truly, I do… The last couple of years must really have been something else, having gone from Fast & Furious, to The Hobbit and now starring as the lead in the re-launching of Dracula – it’s been a bit of a whirlwind, I reckon…
“Yeah, I mean it’s been the fastest six years of my life,” Evans said in recent chat.
“I sometimes stop – not very often – but sometimes stop and take stock of what I’ve actually achieved and I’m very proud of it and this moment in my career sort of feels like the icing on the cake to this point, to be helming my own film and to be playing the title role of a very famous character that’s been played by some fantastic actors throughout the generations.”
There is certainly something harder, grittier and sexier about Evans that differentiates him from his fresh-faced Hollywood counterparts.
“Seven years ago there was a big Twilight “pretty-boy” thing going on and I remember the casting agents saying, “We’ve been looking for men and you look like a man and you carry yourself like a man.” I guess there was a space in the market at that point for a 30-year-old [male] and I filled it. I feel very lucky to be doing it and it’s a bit of an honor actually to be now the new Dracula on the block!”
Indeed, “Untold” takes an entirely new spin on Dracula’s story, combining it with the real-life tale of Vlad the Impaler.
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.’”
“He’s the man that inspired Bran Stoker 400 years later to write the story of Dracula,” Evans continued. “We start with a human story, about this man who is a father and a leader and a king and a husband – a loving husband – who has a very dark past, who is now fighting for the safety of his family and his people. It’s a very human story, which has never been done before.”
My verdict on “Dracula Untold”? Evans pulls it off – but only just…
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