'Wales has so many amazing opportunities location-wise'

FILM director Gareth Evans is discussing his love for Swansea’s Gower coastline a short walk from his home in the idyllic quiet spot, in an accent so muddled it’s hard to tell whether he’s British or American, let alone Welsh.

- JONATHON HILL

“If we were in a pub with my mates, my accent would slip right back in?” he laughs.

“When I was in Indonesia, no-one understood a word I was f****** saying. There’s now almost a weird version of my accent, which comes out when I’m doing things like this. But I can be as Valleys as they come.”

The action fanatic from Hirwaun moved back to Wales in 2015 after a life-changing few years in Indonesia, which involved a chance meeting with a then largely unknown martial artist, which would put them both on the path to stardom.

Evans was schooled at Penderyn Primary and the Vaynor and Penderyn High in Cefn Coed, Caerphilly borough, during which time he was most concerned with his idols Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan.

After his studies, he embarked on a trip to Indonesia in the hope something would soon drop for him in filmmaking, but he never expected it to go as well as it has.

“As a kid, I just wanted to be Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan,” he told the Post ahead of last week’s release of his latest Netflix film, Havoc, starring Tom Hardy and Forest Whitaker, which was entirely filmed in Wales.

“I quickly realised I was terrible at acting and even worse at martial arts. The next best thing was writing scripts, so that’s what I did.”

He was nine when he scribbled his first film script on to several sheets of paper, which his father - then a teacher at Bishop Hedley School in Merthyr Tydfil - had printed and laminated using the dot matrix printer in the school’s computer lab.

“Looking back, I realise how my parents were always encouraging me to pursue my dreams,” Evans recalls.