Hunnam found himself in Lost City of Z
Word had got around that Guy Ritchie was looking for a leading man for his forthcoming King Arthur blockbuster, and Charlie Hunnam felt Excalibur’s pull. The U.K. actor had built his profile over seven seasons of the motorcycle outlaw drama Sons of Anarchy, and his latest film, Pacific Rim, felt like the prelude to a starry new phase of his career.
But Ritchie wanted either Henry Cavill or Michael Fassbender as his leading man, and said he thought Hunnam was wrong for the role.
“I can’t remember the exact verbiage of his reasoning,” Hunnam recalls. “But it really hurt my feelings. So I said, ‘F--that. I’m going to get on a plane and sit down and have a cup of tea with him.’“
A couple of months later, Hunnam was King Arthur.
“To be fair to Charlie, Charlie won the role because he paid for his own flight,” Ritchie said.
Hunnam’s latest creative sortie is The Lost City of Z, a biographical adventure drama directed by James Gray (Two Lovers, We Own the Night), and adapted from a non-fiction book by David Grann. Hunnam plays Percy Fawcett, an English explorer whose expeditions through South America in the early 20th century are legendary.
“I had this acute sense that this was the opportunity I’d been building toward my whole career,” says Hunnam. In September 2015, he, Gray and their fellow cast and crew members arrived in northern Colombia. The two months that followed were, he says, “a real challenge”. Hunnam lost almost 40 pounds.
Hunnam’s parents, Jane and William, divorced when he was two years old. He calls himself an anxious and withdrawn teenager, who was expelled from school at 15. “I haven’t benefited from a first-class education, so I’ve often felt, you know — lacking,” he says. Books and films became his “saviour places.”
There’s a late scene in The Lost City of Z in which Fawcett, now in his 50s, hands a tribal necklace to his eldest son as the two walk through the Devonshire countryside together. It’s a deeply symbolic gift — the aging father acknowledging his life’s work will outlast him — and was inspired, Hunnam says, by a moment he shared with his own father before his death in May 2013.
As he talks, tears start rolling down his cheeks. ”He gave me something that was a part of his history that was very important to him,” he explains, though declines to say what that was.
“It felt like a risk,” he goes on. “I put a lot of my relationship with my father into my work. But he was so work-oriented that I think if I were to ask him ‘Do you think that this is valid and acceptable?’ I’m sure he would endorse it.”