Evan Peters, the actor who keeps walking back into the dark

Evan Peters

Photo: Cacahuate1995 / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 20, 1987 St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Deadpool 2, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Kick-Ass
Awards	Emmy · Golden Globe

There is a version of Evan Peters that most viewers carry around, and it is not a comfortable one. It is the teenage ghost of a haunted Los Angeles house, the blue-haired man shouting at a city council meeting, the Milwaukee chocolate-factory worker behind large glasses who barely raises his voice. For well over a decade the American actor has been television’s most dependable guide to places audiences would rather not visit, and he has said out loud what the trips cost him. The open question now is whether the industry, and Peters himself, will let him be anyone else.

The route to Hollywood started in the Midwest: St. Louis, where he arrived on January 20, 1987, then suburban Ballwin, then Grand Blanc, Michigan, where the family moved in 2001 and where he began taking modeling and acting classes. At 15 he left for Los Angeles with his mother, spent a stretch at Burbank High School and finished his schooling at home so he could go to auditions. His first film, Clipping Adam, came through on only his second audition.

What followed was an apprenticeship rather than a launch. He had a part in the teen comedy Sleepover, a regular role in ABC’s science-fiction series Invasion, recurring turns on Phil of the Future and One Tree Hill, and supporting work in Never Back Down and Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, where he played one of the reluctant hero’s friends.

The turn came in 2011, when Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk cast him as Tate Langdon in the first season of American Horror Story: a soft-spoken teenager who turns out to be a ghost and a school shooter. The anthology format made Peters the franchise’s hinge. Over the following seasons he was Kit Walker, a man committed to an asylum for murders he did not commit; Kyle Spencer, a college student stitched back together by young witches; Jimmy Darling, the “Lobster Boy” of a Florida freak show; James Patrick March, the 1920s hotelier who builds his hotel as a killing machine; and Kai Anderson, the demagogue at the centre of Cult, a season in which he also played Charles Manson and Jim Jones.

In parallel, a much lighter part found him a far bigger audience. As Peter Maximoff, the speedster Quicksilver, in X-Men: Days of Future Past, he stole the film with a slow-motion rescue in a Pentagon kitchen set to Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle”, and Fox kept him through X-Men: Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix. When he appeared in WandaVision in 2021 as an apparent recast Pietro, Marvel fans assumed the multiverse had arrived; the character turned out to be Ralph Bohner, a local man under a spell, and the reveal became one of the most argued-over jokes of the series.

Some of his best work sits away from both franchises. Bart Layton’s American Animals gave him a lead as Warren Lipka, one of the Kentucky students behind a real rare-book theft at Transylvania University, a part that earned him a British Independent Film Awards nomination. In HBO’s Mare of Easttown he played Colin Zabel, the county detective sent to help Kate Winslet‘s Mare Sheehan, eager and decent and slightly out of his depth. The performance won him the Primetime Emmy for outstanding supporting actor in a limited series in 2021.

Then Murphy handed him the role that fixed the public image. In Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, released by Netflix in 2022, Peters played the Milwaukee serial killer with a flat, withdrawn stillness. He prepared partly by studying Stone Phillips’s 1994 prison interview with Dahmer for Dateline NBC, and he also served as an executive producer. The series became one of Netflix’s biggest English-language hits, and in January 2023 it won him the Golden Globe for best actor in a limited series.

The success came with a charge sheet that no award could settle. Relatives of Dahmer’s victims said the production never contacted them and that the show made them relive the killings; after the Globe, Shirley Hughes, whose son Tony was among the victims, said that people winning awards for playing killers keeps the obsession going. The anger was aimed at Netflix and the producers as much as at the actor, but his face became the image of a wider unease about true-crime entertainment that turns real murders into prestige television. His own account of the period is not triumphant either. Speaking to GQ about the chain of dark characters, he said the work was “hurting my soul” and talked about wanting to follow comic actors such as Jim Carrey and Robin Williams. Few actors of his generation are so closely identified with roles they have openly said they want to stop playing.

His recent choices read like a negotiation between those two versions of himself. In Disney’s TRON: Ares, released in October 2025, he played Julian Dillinger, heir to a software empire. In January 2026 he led Murphy’s FX series The Beauty as FBI agent Cooper Madsen, chasing an infection that makes people flawless before it makes them combust; critics found the body-horror satire chaotic but entertaining, and Peters also executive-produced it. And on September 24, American Horror Story returned for its thirteenth season with Peters back as three of his old characters at once: Tate Langdon, James Patrick March and Kai Anderson. The franchise that made him has, in effect, asked him to walk back through his own archive.

Away from sets he keeps a low profile. His longest public relationship, with the actress Emma Roberts, began when they met on the film Adult World; the couple became engaged in 2014 and separated in 2019.

The next test arrives within days. A Statement, Tom McCarthy’s film adapted from Nathaniel Rich’s book Losing Earth, has its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 3. It places Peters in an ensemble with Paul Rudd, Amy Ryan, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, Tatiana Maslany and Jason Clarke, at a Florida beach resort in 1980 where a group of experts first tries to agree on what carbon dioxide is doing to the climate. It is a darkly comic drama with no ghosts and no killers, and Sony Pictures Classics plans to release it in cinemas in 2027. Also ahead is Falling, a romantic drama from the British director Dominic Savage. For an actor who asked for a way out of the dark, those two films are the first real answer.

Featured Films

Wish (2023) — TRON: Ares (2025) — as Julian Dillinger

Tags: actors, Ryan Murphy, Kate Winslet, American Horror Story, Mare of Easttown, Evan Peters, The Beauty

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