#uiky

[season-77]

Warning: hands porn!

This content is only for those with strong nerves!

Do you see what's going on with those hands?

Just a few seconds of footage, and I'm starting to blush.

(Watching this without sound gives the best effect…)

I have another job suggestion for him: sign language interpreter for adult films…

[morsesnotes]

Anna Maxwell Martin on working with Shaun Evans

Had you worked with Shaun Evans before?

No but he’s so lovely, he’s a really super, kind person, I so enjoyed working with both him and Kevin Doyle. I’d worked with Kevin twice before, so he was a definitive choice for all of us, but I hadn’t worked with Shaun.

There were lots of big conversations about who would play Sweeney, because I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but I did feel there would be times when I would be quite vulnerable playing Delia. I hate saying things like that because of course what Delia has been through is horrific and it’s just acting for me, but I was aware that there was nudity and violence in the series, and you don’t want to be filming with an egomaniac in the room. You want to be with someone who is kind, funny and calm, which Shaun is. If you cast a collaborator then you’re going to be respectful of the people you’re playing and do a good job, and Shaun really understood that. It was really easy to do the difficult scenes because Shaun was so easy to work with, and he is also incredibly talented – he was frighteningly accurate as Sweeney.

You like to ensure there is a positive atmosphere on set, even when filming dark material, don’t you?

That’s the way I work – I couldn’t handle being in character all day long, and even though there were lots of heavy scenes to do I didn’t want a heavy atmosphere on set. That’s where Shaun was really sweet, he just got on that bandwagon with me and I’m very grateful to him for that. Whatever story you’re telling, you must be respectful of the people you’re playing of course, and everyone was very focused and brilliant in doing that. But you also have to be respectful of the fact that crews work very long hours, it can often be a very frenetic job and sets can get quite tense. I am really aware that everyone is doing long hours, so everyone should be able to have a nice time at work and a good working environment, I think that’s really important.

-- ITV Press kit

[shaun-evans-fanblog]

Until I Kill You -2024

[jessieren]

So it isn’t a tache but given that UIKY is seemingly finally going to be shown in the UK I thought I’d go with everyone’s favourite dirty:hot psycho…

You’re welcome

That hat… 😂😂😂

[librawritesstuff]

Telegraph review for Evans in UIKY in two screenshots

[unify-my-universe]

Another chapter of my Shaun Evans inspired story!

Sorry for another plugging of my story but Chapter 2 is up:

Hope you like it, feedback is welcome and hope all you Shaun/Endeavour fans enjoy it :) Let's imagine Shaun's appearance as John Sweeney which let's be honest was conflicting as he was very sexy in the role but also playing a murderer as a good character for a change! :)

[librawritesstuff]

I was doing reasonably ok with these gifs until I got to the bottom right one.

I’ll be twitching underneath my bed for a while. Just slide a cookie under there occasionally, please?

Shaun Evans in Until I Kill You, episode two.

[too-antigonish]

Baby Shaun from Sparkle...

The UIKY cleanse continues...

Screenshot from @rausivana on twitter/x

[season-77]

This new interview with Anna and Shaun gives me the impression that they probably don’t get on very well. Although they always emphasise that they work well together, their body language suggests something completely different. This was evident at the press conference and in the video as well… especially Anna, who seemed to be trying her hardest to sit as far away from him as possible.

[morsesnotes]

A couple quotes from Shaun Evans' interview for the UIKY ITV press kit

How was it working with Anna who plays Delia Balmer?

Working with Anna was fantastic and definitely one of the draws of the job. I have admired her for a long time, I think she is a fantastic actor. I saw her on stage about 10 or 15 years ago. She is brilliant. That’s been one of the joys of this job, to be able to lock into one another as actors and do our work. The nature of the material can be quite dark and unpleasant but that being said, I feel like we’ve spent an enormous amount of time rolling about laughing just to try to keep the mood up and light.

I’ve never done anything like this before and it’s been a really interesting experience with lots of take aways from it. But Anna, she is fantastic, and the rest of the actors as well. The majority of my scenes were with Anna but everyone has been magnificent.

On the subject of Delia, she is a very complex and you could say unsympathetic character?

There’s nothing wrong with being unsympathetic. I think there’s a tendency often, when you’re in meetings about jobs and story meetings, people want every character to be as sympathetic as possible and often, people aren’t actually as sympathetic and they wear the wounds of the life that they have had and we shouldn’t shy away from that.

In terms of the question of why I think people will watch it, one of the draws perhaps could be it’s rare in a story like this that you focus on the victim – that was one of the big things for me in this job - that in no way are we glorifying anyone, but actually we are focusing on someone who went through this ordeal and how she tried to build her life again. The violence at the beginning of the tale shouldn’t be in any way fetishized, that’s not what the story is about its incidental in a way but it’s crucial to how she began to rebuild her life. For me, that’s what is interesting about the tale and I hope the audience will find the same.

[librawritesstuff]

Full text under the cut

Shaun Evans is an unusually energetic and curious man. The actor is best known for his starring role in the peerless ITV Inspector Morse prequel series Endeavour, in which he starred for more than a decade. He also directed a number of episodes, and in his spare time indulged a passion for photography (his black-and-white stills of what he calls “people, places and things” recently featured in an exhibition of actors’ work). Evans also seizes the day a little earlier than most: 5am is often the reveille hour in Evans’s London abode. And after finishing Endeavour at the end of 2022 — his character drove off into the sunset after cracking his final case, his Jaguar passing another driven by a CGI-recreated John Thaw — he filled the gap between jobs by travelling to Italy to learn the language.

“I love the culture,” he tells me with a handshake and a broad grin when we meet in the green room of the Orange Tree Theatre in west London, where he is nearing the end of a run of David Edgar’s well-received play Here in America, about the film director Elia Kazan (played by Evans) and the playwright Arthur Miller. “After you finish a job like Endeavour your mind is still buzzing and I wanted to do something completely unconnected to work,” he says.

Over the course of an hour, this 44-year-old son of a taxi driver father and hospital worker mother asks me nearly as many questions as I ask him — about my job, the nature of interviewing and whether or not this one has gone well. He certainly seems happy and not just because, as a left-leaning man, he is delighted about the change of government (“I feel like the grown-ups have entered the room”). He also seems not entirely annoyed to be sitting in front of a Dictaphone, which is a firstfor him: we met a few times when he was playing the Oxford detective, and even though his character was beloved by millions he always seemed to look on an hour with a journalist in the manner of an 18th-century French aristocrat surveying a guillotine scaffold.

Evans’s first starring role since Endeavour could not be more different: he is playing the real-life serial killer John Sweeney in ITV’s Until I Kill You, which is based on a book by Sweeney’s former girlfriend Delia Balmer who (miraculously) got away. Did Evans consciously choose the least Endeavour-like role he could imagine?

“It doesn’t really work that way,” he says in his lilting Liverpudlian accent. “You can’t really say, ‘I’m only going to do that next’ or ‘I’m really going to do this’ as an actor — you just hope that there will be another job coming. I love working but I did want to do something I’ve not done before and felt a challenge.”

Until I Kill You depicts scenes of extreme violence: Sweeney held Balmer (played by Anna Maxwell Martin) hostage, tied to a bed for four days and later attacked her with an axe. Did Evans worry that this could join the long list of dramas that cynically play on female fears? He nods.

“I completely agree and that was a lot of my hesitation going into it too, and why I was on the fence for a while,” he says. But he trusted the instincts of the producers, World Productions, with whom he had worked on the BBC submarine-set thriller Vigil with Suranne Jones. He was keen that Sweeney wasn’t represented as a psychopath from the beginning and there is something unsettling in the scenes in which he first enters Balmer’s life — a knight in shining armour ready to rescue the awkward, slightly friendless woman.

“I like the act of acting and I equally like the act of directing,” Evans says

Was Evans affected by playing such an extreme character? “To a degree, but only in the same way that any other job does. Directing is different because you’ve got to overthink it. You’ve got to shape it. A equals B and if you haven’t got that shot, then it doesn’t work. With acting, you try not to think about it too much and then just go and do it. The more I intellectualise and label something, the more inhibited I am.”

Evans bought Balmer’s book, Living with a Serial Killer, but decided not to read it. He didn’t meet the real Delia Balmer, even though she visited the set, and only met Maxwell Martin late into the shoot. Since a visit to John Sweeney is off the cards, Evans says he conjured the character from his imagination — as a man who didn’t set out to kill but who was ruled by a vicious anger

The real Sweeney made many unpleasant drawings during his crime spree, including some of his violent fantasies,which Evans kept photocopies of in his trailer — partly because there were scenes that showed Sweeney drawing and he wanted to get the technique right. “I didn’t look at them every time. But I had them as a sort of presence to see exactly what was going on in his mind, and also how that was going to be represented. Pretty dark material.”

Later he adds more pointedly, “I got paid really good money for it, as actors can do. Who cares how hard it was?”

I tell him he has many fans and they probably do care, not least because of the affection people have for him and Endeavour. He smiles, reminding me that the show ended on a high and pointing out that he and co-stars such as Roger Allam, James Bradshaw and Anton Lesser all still see each other and come to each other’s plays.

I tell him I know a lot of people with a crush on him. When he strays briefly from his usual policy of not answering personal questions and confirms that he does have a girlfriend (who doesn’t work in the acting or TV business), I josh that they will be sorry to hear it. He laughs, joking that they would be put off by his Scouse accent: “As soon as you start talking they think, ‘It mustn’t be him, sitting there at the back with his hoodie on.’”

Evans went to a state school, St Edward’s College, on the outskirts of Liverpool before training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. His first break was as the French teacher John Paul Keating in the Channel 4 comedy-drama Teachers in 2002. Now, post Endeavour, he feels he has achieved “the perfect level of fame”.

“If people come and say hello they’re always super complimentary. And I really appreciate it. I’m grateful for it, but [fame] is not a level where it in any way hinders my life. You just want to sit on the Tube and watch people without feeling like it’s you who’s being watched. You want to see situations unfold. I think if I couldn’t live that life, I’d resent it. I think I’d go and do something else.”

He hopes to produce a “big body of decent work” of his photography. Does he have any other unfulfilled ambitions?

“I like the act of acting and I equally like the act of directing, and that’s enough for me. I’ve got no desire to say, ‘I’ve got to make a feature,’ and then I’m a proper director? No. I’ve been doing it for ten years, I already am. That’s why I feel so fortunate: I can spin lots of plates and if one thing isn’t going I can pick up on something else — and I like that, just as a storyteller. Even if it’s just still photography, it’s still silent storytelling.”

Shaun Evans interview in The Times today

[shaun-evans-fanblog]

And when are they gonna run Until I Kill You in the UK? I hear nothing new. I’ve been holding onto screenshots and discussions for forever! I’m gonna have to watch again to remember.

[jessieren]

Announcing the all new Saturday caption competition…

Do your worst best tumblr

[librawritesstuff]

Tux Tuesday: one of these bedscenes involved a tux.

One definitely did not.

Does it really matter?

Nope.

[season-77]

Only Evans can look at someone like that, especially when he’s playing a (sometimes dirty) hot psychopath.

[eri-pl]

Post-TA Quenya HC

So, Quenya is pronounced like Latin, right? Except Quenya has "c" alwaqys read as "k", never as "s", regardless of the vowels around it.

But so did Latin, originally. In Roman Empire, Latin was all c->k and also I think v->w (when you're sad, remember: ueni, uidi, uiki. It always makes me laugh.)

Hence, I propose a headcanon: After most of the Elves sail, and the rest hides, people who still use Quenya (scholars) drift the pronunciation like it happened with Medieval Latin. And they say "Sirdan the shipwright" and stuff like this.

(Cut to Maglor being called on his "wrong" pronunciation, or stuff like that) (and then you have English church Latin and "Chirdan". Yes, pronouncing c as ch in Latin is my pet peeve, it just sounds wrong to me, sorry to all Italians, it's fine in Italian, just please not Latin) (Also people pronounce Earendil as Ee-rendil anyway :( )

(@dfwbwfbbwfbwf that's the HC which I was talking about in the comment)