It is one thing to read about a closeted teenager hiding gay books from his Jehovah’s Witness parents. It is another thing entirely to hear Luke Evans describe the exact moment he came home, lifted the cushion of the armchair in his bedroom, and realized the secret stash he had spent years building was gone.
His whole body started shaking. He sat down on the chair. He already knew, with absolute certainty, what was coming next.
What Luke didn’t know yet was what his father had already done with it – or that his parents had quietly known for months and said nothing.
By any normal measure, Luke is now one of the very few openly gay men at the top tier of Hollywood action and blockbuster cinema – the brooding Bard in The Hobbit trilogy, Owen Shaw in Fast & Furious 6, Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, Dracula in Dracula Untold, plus a current Broadway run that has him in awards conversations again.
Most leading men with that resume guard their backstory like a state secret. Luke just published his.
In a strikingly candid new sit-down on the How to Fail podcast with Elizabeth Day – tied to his newly published memoir Boy from the Valleys – he walks through the bonfire in the back garden, the Hollywood premiere that turned the gay community against him, and the soulmate he finally met in his 40s.
But it all goes back to that armchair.
The Little Cardiff Bookshop Where It All Started
Luke grew up in the South Wales valleys, the only child of devout Jehovah’s Witness parents – David and Yvonne. Weekends meant knocking on neighbors’ doors to warn them about the coming Armageddon.
School meant being targeted, every day, with the same two slurs: one aimed at his religion, one aimed at something he didn’t yet have a word for.
“I knew that what I was feeling and who I was, was dead against what the religion believed,” he says. “And I knew what would happen to people like who I knew I was turning into.”
The only escape was the train into Cardiff with his mom. While she went shopping at Howells and Debenhams, Luke wandered. One day, in a little arcade, he found a small bookshop called Chapter and Verse – and in one corner, an LGBT section.
He pulled down a book and realized it was Maurice, the famous E.M. Forster gay novel. Next to it: a safe sex guide. A gay romance novel. Photo books by Tom of Finland – the Finnish artist whose hyper-masculine, leather-clad fantasy men Luke would, decades later, channel into his own custom Palomo Spain ensemble at the 2026 Met Gala in May, a look the AP promptly nicknamed “Luke of Finland.”
Back in that little Cardiff arcade, though, the boy flipping through those photo books had no idea he’d ever wear something like that, let alone do it on a red carpet.
“That was the moment I had an outlet where I could learn about that,” he says. “I wasn’t on my own.”
The Armchair, The Quicksave Bag, And A Secret Built Over Years
Week after week, every time his mom went shopping, Luke quietly bought more. He paid with the pocket money he’d saved from odd jobs around the valleys. And he had to hide it.
His parents had bought new furniture. Luke claimed the old armchair from their living room for his bedroom. He folded everything – books, photographs, the lot – into a Quicksave carrier bag, and tucked it deep inside the chair’s lining.
He was the only one who knew it was there.
For a closeted Jehovah’s Witness kid in the South Wales valleys, that armchair was a small piece of freedom. And then, one day, it wasn’t.
The Day He Came Home And It Was Gone
“I went to look for it and it had gone,” Luke says. “My whole life flashed before my eyes in that very moment. I put the cushion back on the chair and I sat on it. My whole body was shaking, because this was the moment I was dreading.”
He went upstairs and packed a suitcase.
He knew, from other families in his district, exactly what happened to JW sons whose parents discovered they were gay. The boys had been thrown out. Some of them were never spoken to again.
“I was ready,” he says. “I clearly had processed what-ifs before this moment, and I knew that this is what would happen.”
Then he went to confront his mom and dad.
What His Father Had Done In The Garden
The hardest part wasn’t the confrontation. It was the answer.
His parents had found the stash months earlier. They had simply chosen not to mention it. And when Luke finally asked his mother where his things were, she told him exactly what had happened.
“Your father took it into the garden, lit a bonfire, and burnt it page by page,” she said. “And we don’t want to talk about it again.”
They didn’t. Not for years.
Luke describes the silence that followed as more frustrating than any argument could have been. The stash was gone. The conversation was closed.
The shame, the fear, the secret – all of it – was now something everyone in the house knew about, and no one was allowed to name.
It is, in some ways, the moment that explains everything that came after. The plan to leave home at 16, already in motion since he was 12.
The decision to come out to his mother a few years later, sitting on a swing set in a park as the sun went down. And the lifelong instinct to perform a version of himself that the people around him could accept.
When Hollywood Came Calling – And The Gay Community Turned On Him
By the time Luke broke into film at 30, with Clash of the Titans opposite Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes, he was already out. Everyone in his world knew he was gay. He thought that part was settled.
It wasn’t.
“All of a sudden it was like first day at school again,” he says. He was now an international leading man playing big, traditionally masculine roles. Audiences who’d never heard of him assumed he was straight. Studios braced for what they thought would happen if he wasn’t.
For his first major premiere, Luke walked the red carpet with his best friend Holly – a glamorous woman he’d known for years and who, he says, simply wanted to dress up and enjoy the night.
The Daily Mail ran a piece calling her his girlfriend.
The backlash that followed didn’t come from the studios or the audiences he’d been bracing for. It came from gay men.
“It caused some really horrible backlash, especially from the gay community,” Luke says. The accusations flew that he’d taken a beard to a premiere. That he was closeting himself for Hollywood. That the openly gay version of him had been a phase.
“I could see it all just about to fall between my fingers,” he says of his career. “And I was like, it just never ends.”
The Soulmate He Found In His 40s
For all the heaviness, the interview keeps returning to one quiet thing – that Luke is, finally, happy.
He has been with his partner Fran for almost four years. He calls him his soulmate without flinching, then talks about what that word actually means to him. Not fireworks. Not drama. Ease.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had an easy relationship, but I have it now,” he says. “We giggle together. We go to the gym together. We’re also fine apart.”
He talks about the strength and confidence he draws from being with Fran. About the four-year stretch that has felt like four days. About the version of himself that took until his 40s to arrive.
He also talks – briefly, with charming reluctance – about the dinner at Jennifer Aniston‘s house where he found himself seated between Jennifer and Lisa Kudrow. Yes, that is Rachel and Phoebe at the same table. No, he was not prepared.
Watch The Full Interview
There is far more in the full sit-down with Elizabeth – the bullying at school, the loving but complicated relationship with his parents, the moment he bought the house next door to them so they would never have to worry about money again, and the tattoo that hides his mom and dad’s initials inside what looks like a heartbeat.
It is one of the most candid hours Luke has given in years. Watch the whole thing below:
From a teenage boy stuffing a Quicksave bag full of forbidden books into the lining of an armchair, to a 47-year-old Hollywood leading man walking the Met Gala steps as a living tribute to Tom of Finland – it is a longer road than most.
Luke walked it without a map, without a blueprint, and for years without anyone he could safely tell. The boy who packed that suitcase in his bedroom never got thrown out. He just kept going. And somewhere along the way, he became the kind of man other gay men get to look up to.