Evan Williams
Evan Williams is an actor, born 1985.
Evan Williams grew up in Alberta and made his screen debut in 2006 in Save the Last Dance 2, then spent the back end of that decade where a great many Canadian actors begin, on Degrassi: The Next Generation, playing Kelly Ashoona.
The role that changed his register was the Chevalier de Lorraine in Versailles, the French-made, English-language costume drama about the court of Louis XIV, which he played from 2015 to 2018. It is a genuinely difficult part: a courtier whose relationship with the king's brother the series presents without apology or moralising, and who has to be simultaneously frivolous and dangerous or the whole court plot stops working. Williams gives him a bored, lethal wit that makes the palace manoeuvring readable, and he is the most watchable person on screen in several of the show's weakest episodes.
Since then he has taken the working actor's mix. He was Eddy G. Robinson Jr. in Blonde, a small part in a film that divided everyone who saw it. He has done a horror picture, a couple of light romances, and in 2023 became a lead on the Hallmark Channel series The Way Home as Elliot Augustine, which is the steadiest job of his career and, in a genre built on comfort, an intelligent use of an actor who can suggest a private grievance under a pleasant surface.
Movies (8)
TV (3)
Where to start with Evan Williams
Versailles first, and give it three episodes before you decide. The series takes a while to work out what it is, but Williams as the Chevalier is good from the opening hour, and the court intrigue is far sharper than the corset-drama packaging suggests. It remains the fullest thing he has done.
For the current version of him, The Way Home is a Hallmark drama with a time-slip premise and rather more melancholy than that network usually permits, and he anchors a large share of it.
Among the scattered film work, Blonde is the most ambitious and the most divisive thing on his list, Grey Gardens is a small part in a good HBO film, and Escape Room is the low-budget horror one, not the 2019 studio picture with the same name. Awkward. and Save the Last Dance 2 are the early jobs, useful mainly for the before-and-after.