Rupert Evans is the ordinary man a film hires so that the extraordinary ones have somebody to explain themselves to. He plays it with a quiet decency that is easy to overlook, and the films we have seen him in have overlooked it.
Fi1m perspective
In Hellboy (2004), Rupert Evans walks into the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense as John Myers, the new agent, and spends the film being told things. He plays Myers as decent and puzzled, which is the right choice, because we are puzzled too. The trouble is that Guillermo del Toro already has a better way into his world in Ron Perlman's sulking, cigar-chewing demon, and Myers is left holding the door. The film then asks us to take a romantic triangle between him, Liz and Hellboy seriously, and we did not believe it for a second; not because Evans plays it badly, but because Perlman's Hellboy is the only one of the three we cared about, and the script never gives Myers a reason to compete.
That is the shape of his film career. Evans trained at Webber Douglas, graduating in 2001, worked on stage including with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and got his first major film role in Hellboy. Five years later he was Synesius in Alejandro Amenábar's Agora (2009), a lavishly built argument about reason and faith in fourth-century Alexandria that belongs to Rachel Weisz. We scored it 66 and did not single him out, which is fair to the film and a little hard on him. He has been dry about that one himself, recalling John Hurt's advice that actors take jobs for the script, the director, the money or the location, and adding that "Agora, for me, was about the location."
The work critics rate most highly has come away from cinemas. The Canal (2014) gave him a lead in a horror thriller and some of his strongest notices. Then American television found him: Frank Frink across three seasons of The Man in the High Castle (2015–2018), Harry Greenwood in Charmed (2018–2022), where he also directed the occasional episode, and a part in Bridgerton (2022). We have not reviewed those and will not judge them here. What the run suggests is a classically trained actor who is more use with ten hours than with ten scenes, because his kind of playing is small and steady and needs time to register.
He has said of Frank Frink that he feels an affinity with him, and that being rejected is hard and he has had a lot of it as an actor. It is not a complaint, and it explains the work. Evans plays men who are not the point of the story and knows it; the interesting question is what happens when someone makes them the point. On the evidence of the films we have covered, the cinema has not yet bothered to find out, and the television has.
Biography
Rupert Evans is a British actor. He trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, graduating in 2001, after attending Bilton Grange School and Milton Abbey School. He is a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Evans first gained notice for his role as FBI agent John Myers in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy (2004). His other film credits include Agora (2009), The Canal (2014), The Boy (2016) and American Pastoral (2016). On television he has appeared in North & South (2004), The Man in the High Castle (2015–2018) as Frank Frink, Charmed (2018–2022) as Harry Greenwood and Bridgerton (2022) as Lord Edmund Bridgerton.
