Evan Peters is a man of many characters. While he recently played the grounded cop Colin Zabel on HBO’s hit series Mare of Easttown across Kate Winslet, his body of work spans so many different embodied roles, each different than the one before.
Evan has played several roles across eight seasons of the FX horror anthology series American Horror Story — but in season 7 alone, he played a total of six characters, many of whom were real-life cult leaders. In addition to researching all of those parts, Evan also portrayed the fictional cult leader Kai Anderson.
Of the challenges of playing such nefarious characters for the AHS franchise, Evan told GQ in July 2018 about how different he was from the roles he was cast in, saying, “I’m goofy, I’m silly, I like to have fun. I don’t like to yell and scream. I actually hate it. I think it’s disgusting and really awful, and it’s been a challenge for me. Horror Story sort of demanded that of me.”
While Evans certainly hasn’t shied away from taking on characters of a less than savory nature, he also has enjoyed more playful roles, like that of Pietro Maximoff, A.K.A. Quicksilver, in the X-Men franchise.
Not only did he portray the lightning-fast mutant in the X-Men universe, but he crossed over and played the character, who was initially portrayed by Aaron-Taylor Johnson in Age of Ultron leading up to the character’s death, in the MCU’s WandaVision.
However, it was later revealed that Evan’s true character in WandaVision, which starred Elizabeth Olsen as Pietro’s sister, Wanda Maximoff, is an actor named Ralph Bohner who was being manipulated by the witch Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) to appear as Pietro.
Looking forward, Evan’s most challenging role might be to come with his portrayal of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in Netflix’s limited series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which is also produced by his longtime collaborator, showrunner Ryan Murphy.
Talking with Variety in April 2021, Evans teased the series, saying, “There are beautifully written scripts. You can have all the backstory you want, but at the end of the day we’re not making a documentary.”
Scroll through the photos below to see Evan’s drastic character changes throughout his career.