LOST CITY OF Z STAR CHARL I didn’t talk to my girlfriend for 5 months while I was in jungle... the film is a love letter to her

HUNKY actor Charlie Hunnam was determined to lose himself in his role as an intrepid explorer searching for a lost ancient city in the Amazon jungle.

And the star ended up going through almost exactly what his real-life character Colonel Percival Fawcett did on his epic quest way back in the early 1900s.

He cut himself off from the world – including the woman he loved.

New Hollywood sensation Charlie had no contact with girlfriend of 12 years Morgana McNelis for five months while making hotly tipped blockbuster The Lost City of Z.

And like Colonel Fawcett’s real wife Nina, the jewellery designer wasn’t very happy.

But today the Geordie pin-up reveals he dedicated the whole movie as a “love letter” to Morgana, 33 – and an apology.

Charlie, 37, says: “We went to Colombia and the mail system doesn’t really work very well. It’s completely unreliable. I received a letter from her and I realised from the tone of it and things she was saying that she hadn’t received the two letters I sent before.

“I then just stopped writing to her altogether which obviously makes me sound like a total bastard. Appropriately so, but I was very apologetic.

“I bought her an emerald when I returned home from Columbia, because it’s the place of emeralds.

Apology

“But I think she was offended I brought that up because it felt reductive to her of that real sacrifice she had made for this, which was enormous.”

But any lingering frostiness there may have been between them over his lack of letters home ended when he took her to see the movie.

“I almost hate going to see films I’ve been in for the first time,” says Charlie. “But this was a different experience. I took my girlfriend with me, and she watched it and recognised that it was both an apology, a recognition and a love letter to her. We were making it for our loved ones.”

The film, which co-stars Robert Pattinson and Sienna Miller as Fawcett’s wife Nina, is expected to be one of the year’s huge hits as it tells an already fascinating real life story.

Born in Devon in 1867, Col Fawcett joined the army at 18 and went on his first mission with the Royal Geographical Society to South America in 1906, to map the uncharted border between Bolivia and Brazil. On the adventure he found evidence of what he thought was a lost city of tremendous riches.

He returned to the Mato Grosso region of Brazil time and again before the First World War in which he was gassed in the Belgian trenches. Once he claimed he encountered a 62ft anaconda. His quest had become legendary, and was even said to inspire friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book The Lost World, as well as Indiana Jones. In 1925, by then 57, he went on one last trip to South America, taking his 21- year- old son Jack. The pair disappeared – never to be seen again. More than 100 men sent on various missions to look for him also went missing. Charlie has his own ideas on the mystery. He says: “Things he had with him, like his compass and ring, showed up in pawn shops later on. So I believe bandits followed him into the j ungleg l e and killed ed him for his equipment.”quipment.” Charlie’s arlie’s five months nths in South America erica may have been n nothing like as dangerous gerous – but he lost a lot of weight to look right for the role.

“I do play a lot of physically sically formidable characters, acters, but in reality I’m a small mall guy,” says 5ft 10in Charlie. rlie. “I recently bulked up to 190lbs 90lbs [13st 8lb] which is the biggest est I have ever been. But it’s all gone.” one.”

Hee laughs off descriptions of himself self as the latest screen sex symbol.bol. “You get this reputation for being a certain thing but it’s not like ike I ever set out to be that,” he says. ays. “I just think it’s funny.”

But ut Charlie, briefly married to actress ess Katharine Towne in the early y Noughties, isn’t shy about flashing hing the flesh. The son of a scrapp merchant, whose first small role was in Newcastle children’s series es Byker Grove, stripped off in Channelhannel 4’s groundbreaking