Luke Evans says King Charles' 'eyes lit up' in during memorable encounter

Luke Evans recalled his memorable meeting with King Charles.

In his 2025 memoir, Boy from the Valleys: My Unexpected Journey, Evans revealed his conversation with Charles when he was invited to a Prince’s Trust gala dinner in 2014.

Evans revealed that it was the first time he met King Charles. As the actor shared “a good, strong handshake” he told Charles about finishing filming the film Dracula Untold at the time, which was inspired by the 1897 Bram Stoker vampire novel Dracula.

Since the actor played Vlad Tepes III, commonly known as Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Dracula, Charles “eyes lit up” after hearing this and he went on to say, “I’ll tell you an interesting story. I’m actually related to Vlad Tepes.”

Evans wrote in the memoir, “to my astonishment, he then proceeded to talk me through his entire lineage, all the way back to the 1400s.”

“He told me he now owns a number of properties in Romania, where Vlad was ruler,” Evans wrote further, adding that when he told Charles that he thought it an “incredible story” the monarch said, “Yes, and not a lot of people know it.”

Evans went on to add about the encounter, “I noticed he had stayed a little longer with me than he had with other guests, probably because we had this fascinating thing to talk about.”

“Charles makes you feel as if he’s genuinely interested in what you have to say, which is remarkable when you consider he has to do this several times a day. You imagine he’d become robotic, just going through the motions every time, but he really seems to engage,” Luke Evans also mentioned.

It is worth mentioning that Luke Evans had been selected as the ambassador for the charity (now the King’s Trust), founded by King Charles in 1976 to help the disadvantaged youth in the UK.