EVAN PETERS

Talent: Evan Peters
Photographer: Michael Schwartz
Stylist: Mark Holmes

In the anthology series American Horror Story, Evan Peters has already played a mentally unhinged ghost in Tate Langdon, a murderous hotel owner in James March, a cult leader from Michigan in Kai Anderson, and a serial killer, cult leader and (probable) ghost in Charles Manson. It’s all a bit mad.

Then there’s Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s Pose, a drama about the queer ballroom culture in New York City in the late 1980s, which notably cast more transgender performers than any other television show in history.

Peters plays Stan Bowes, a married man who, while working for Donald Trump, finds himself in a relationship with a transgender woman of colour, Angel (Indya Moore). It’s boundary smashing and timely television, but these complicated, twisted and emotionally draining roles do take their toll.

Before Peters revives his role in X-Men: Dark Phoenix as superhero Quicksilver — the one with superhuman speed — Halloween is upon us. Read: Horror Story’s eighth season, Apocalypse, which returns to our screens with Peters (quite literally) reviving Tate Langdon.

ICON sat down with the actor on the set of our cover-story shoot in Los Angeles — “This is actually Randal Kleiser’s house, the director of Grease,” Peters schools us — to talk screen roles, idols, rubber suits in Montreal and the legacy of an Australian actor who lost himself to this darker side of acting.