Luke Evans claims being gay hasn't cost him any roles

“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,” the Beauty and the Beast star told The Jackal magazine in a recent interview.

Asked if Hollywood's ready for a gay action hero, the 37-year-old says "it's difficult to answer."

"I don’t know how ‘Hollywood’, as you call it, thinks. I don’t think about it," he says. "I don’t feel they’re connected. Talent, success, what you do in your personal life – I don’t see how one should have an effect on the other."

The profile seems to posit Evans, who had his breakout role in 2010's Clash of the Titans remake, as an entertainer who's been comfortably out all along. But while he gave a frank interview to The Advocate in which he said, "If... I'm going to be a poor man at 60, then at least I've lived a happy, open, gay life and not had to hide it from anybody," a few years later he was playing it straight.

In 2009, Evans signed with new management company and, a year later, was suddenly dating fashion publicist Holly Goodchild. "We are nowhere near engaged but things are really good," she told the paper. Asked about the sudden change, Evans' publicist said he "[opened up] a long time ago when he was an inexperienced, young actor... and now with maturity and hindsight, he has learned not to engage the press in his personal life again."

Except to say he's dating a publicist?

In 2012, Evans' Hobbit co-star Ian McKellen inadvertently re-outed him in an interview, saying "Look only at how many gay actors are in Hobbit—two of the dwarves, along with Luke Evans, Stephen Fry and Lee Pace."

These days the Welsh stunner seems to acknowledge his sexuality, but isn't very comfortable talking particulars.

"As an actor you have to keep some sort of enigma and mystery. There’s a dignity to keeping private," says Evans, who's been paired until recently with Spanish model Jon Kortajarena. "I’m trying to keep a bit of dignity to my private life and to protect the people in my life.”

What we can make public is that Evans is currently filming an adaptation of Caleb Carr's The Alienist.

h/t: Hollywood.com