Luke Evans joins starry cast of Disney’s live-action Pinocchio remake
Luke Evans. (Mark Cuthbert/UK Press via Getty Images)
Luke Evans will star in Disney’s Pinocchio live-action remake.
The Welsh Beauty and the Beast star, according to Deadline, is set to join Tom Hanks for the live-action remake of the beloved 1940 animated feature.
He will play The Coachman, a shadowy figure that lures “stupid little boys” to Pleasure Island, a cursed island that has an amusement park on it. There, the boys are transformed into donkeys and sold on the black market.
He’s one of several antagonists in the original that attempts to exploit Pinocchio for their own personal gain.
Hanks will play Geppetto, the kindly woodcarver who made the eponymous Pinocchio puppet, in the Robert Zemeckis-directed reboot. Zemeckis’s previous credits include Forest Gump.
In a sign of the times, the Luke Evans-starring Pinocchio will land straight onto the studio’s streaming service Disney Plus sometime in 2022, rather than showing in movie theatres.
Evans has previously worked with Disney, playing the aggressively handsome and navel-gazing Gaston in the 2017 remake of Beauty and the Beast, opposite Emma Watson. He’ll reprise the role in a forthcoming Disney Plus spin-off series.
Luke Evans thinks ‘relationships and break-ups are hard’.
The news comes after Luke Evans hit out at the press for crowbarring his relationship history wide open.
In an earlier interview with The Times newspaper, the actor appeared to confirm months-long speculation that he had called it quits with art director Rafael Olarra.
“It is what it is,” he tersely told the reporter when asked about being single.
Evans responded to the ensuing reports about his relationship status on social media. He wrote: “Just to be clear, no one, I repeat, no one, knows what is going on in my personal life from apart from me.
Good words from igs Luke Evans 💯
if the choose to create sensational story about my personal life, that is their choice. pic.twitter.com/deqLN3RAYZ
— & (@brownsgr_) January 12, 2021
“A simple one-word comment made in an interview does not give gossip magazines anything more than that.
“If they choose to create sensational stories about my personal life, that is their choice, they wanna get hits to their page, I get it.
“But the truth is, they know very little about what’s really going on in my life.
“Relationships are hard, breakups are hard and anything is black and white. Love is a complex animal.”
