Evan Peters' Role Transformations: 'AHS' to Dahmer

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.

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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.

Luke Cooper, ‘The Office’

Before captivating fans on TV with several characters in the horror anthology American Horror Story, Evan played Michael Scott’s nephew Luke Cooper on the season 7 episode of The Office titled “Nepotism.” After showing a terrible attitude and costing Dunder-Mifflin an important client, Luke is spanked in the middle of the office by Michael.

Kai Anderson, ‘AHS: Cult’

After playing cult leader Kai Anderson on American Horror Story: Cult, Evan took a hiatus from acting. Evan told GQ Style in 2018 about his decision to “take a break,” telling the publication, “I think it was a full-on burnout,” before adding that he was going to “regroup, decompress, get back in touch with what I feel like I want to do. Not that I didn’t want to do any of those roles – they’re exactly what I wanted to do. It was just zero to 100 instantaneously. I want to play music.”

Jim Jones, ‘AHS: Cult’

In addition to playing the fictional cult leader Kai Anderson on AHS, he also portrayed cult leader, Jim Jones, in flashbacks during season 7. Before stepping into character to portray the founder of The People’s Temple who ordered his followers to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide, Evan told The Los Angeles Times, “I kept listening to the video of him doing the mass suicide tape, because that’s what we were gonna shoot. It’s horrific. How he’s sort of manipulating all these people. And you hear people crying out and trying to argue against him. … It’s just … it’s tragic. It was intense. But I definitely learned a lot.”

Charles Manson, ‘AHS: Cult’

While appearing on Conan in 2017, Evan said that it “was basically my own little horror story trying to figure out how to” get into character for Charles Manson and the other cult leaders. On his uncanny resemblance to Manson, he told Conan O’Brien, “Special effects did some great prosthetics throughout the process. But yeah, it was intense.”

David Koresh, ‘AHS: Cult’

Evan also slipped into the role of David Koresh, who was a leader of the Branch Davidians. Koresh had been involved with a 51-day standoff with authorities that ended in February 1993 when the so-called Siege of Waco began at Mount Carmel Center. Authorities believed that Koresh’s right-hand man, Steve Schneider, shot him before turning the gun on himself. In the latter part of the siege, 79 cult followers who were barricaded inside a building died after a fire broke out.

Quicksilver, ‘X-Men’ franchise and ‘WandaVision’

Not only has Evan played Quicksilver (Pietro Maximoff) in X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse, Deadpool 2 and X-Men: Dark Phoenix, he also briefly brought over the character into the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s WandaVision on Disney+, despite Aaron Taylor-Johnson having previously played the character in Age of Ultron. Of the crossover (that had a twist), Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said at the Disney+ TCA presentation that “there were all sorts of discussions, but I believe we ended up going with what you saw relatively early on in the development process. It’s just another way that certain people were messing around with Wanda.”

Colin Zabel, ‘Mare of Easttown’

Of his emotional scene where his character Colin drunkenly divulges insecurities to Mare (Winslet), Evan told Vanity Fair, “The reason [director] Craig [Zobel] and I were emotional and hugging was because I was hysterically sobbing. I thought we didn’t get the scene. I was like, ‘We didn’t get, we didn’t get it. I can’t do this. I’m terrible. I’m going to shadow you, Craig, and be a director, because I can’t do it anymore.’” Evan added, “And he was like, ‘It’s OK. It’s cool, man. I think we got it.’ … What’s going on with my internal judgment? Where I don’t even know if it’s good.”

Jeffrey Dahmer, ‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’

Before first-look photos of Evan stepping into the role of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer dropped in June 2021, Evan opened up to Variety in April about his research for the role, saying, “I’ve read so much, I’ve watched so much, I’ve seen so much, and at a certain point, you’ve got to say, ‘All right, that’s enough.’”