Luke Evans

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And all these very macho... It was lurking underneath the whole time.

It was just there.

I thought maybe this is my last time to do something crazy, because in musical theatre college, it's a bit like fame, you know.

You shut off the time.

You can just do what you want and wear your ankle warmers and prance around King's Cross and, you know, do that.

And I was coming to the end of it, so maybe it was my last hurrah of being...

Free and liberated and do something so sort of against type for me.

Sure, yeah.

Which is sort of the attraction that drew me to it 35 years later is this immense challenge for me and what people think of me and who I am.

Yeah.

To answer your question, it was when I was 19 years old.

Sam?

I think, you know, being a gay man and remembering what it was like to be a gay kid in an environment where I wasn't allowed to express that or even acknowledge it, if I had have been able to have watched or seen just even a snippet of the film or the stage production, I think it...

would have allowed me to go, okay, well, I'm not exactly like any of these people on that screen, but there's something that they are doing and being fine about and feeling themselves, which would have triggered a massive reaction in me as a young kid if I'd have had that opportunity.

So in answer to your question, I think what it has done, and I know this because for the last three and a half weeks, I go out to the stage door every night.

I meet 50, 60 people every night.

And during that progression from one side of the barrier to the end, I meet people in their 80s down to 14-year-old trans kids saying, like, this show changed my opinion of myself.

I saw something different.

in some character that made me see myself and allowed me to go, I'm not alone, which is an extraordinary thing.