‘I have been incredibly selfish…’

Once Charlie Hunnam has a role in his sights, he won’t let a hungry crocodile – or Guy Ritchie – stand in his way. So why did he flee Fift Fifty Shades of Grey?

Afew years ago, word 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 Newcastle-born actor had built his profile over seven seasons of the motorcycle outlaw drama Sons of Anarchy, and his latest film – Guillermo del Toro’s giant monster mazurka Pacific Rim – felt like the prelude to a starry new phase of his career.

So he threw his hat into the ring – and was shocked by the speed and ferocity with which it was thrown back. Not only had Ritchie already decided he wanted either Henry Cavill or Michael Fassbender as his leading man, he specifically said he thought Hunnam entirely wrong for the role.

“I can’t remember the exact verbiage of his reasoning,” Hunnam recalls, stretching back in his armchair in a coffeecoloured hotel room. “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.’ ”

He never intended to browbeat and cajole the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels director into giving him an audition. That’s just how things worked out. And a couple of months later, Warner Bros announced that Hunnam was their King Arthur.

“To be fair to Charlie, Charlie won the role because he paid for his own flight,” Ritchie later elaborated.

“I just wanted to be seen and recognised, you know,” Hunnam says. “It felt reductive. I thought, ‘F--- it, I’m going to show him who I am.’ ”

So who is Charlie Hunnam? The tall, serious 36-year-old sitting in front of me doesn’t look much like Jax Teller, Sons of Anarchy’s flaxen-haired Harley-straddler, or the fearless, often shirtless Queer as Folk kid from Channel 4’s landmark gay drama series back in 1999 – or, for that matter, like either of the decorous Del Toro hunks at the recent end of his CV. (After Pacific Rim, he played a suave sleuth in the Mexican director’s gothic romance Crimson Peak.) Even his accent is hard to pin down. There’s a Tyneside tang in there, but mixed with a sticky Californian drawl (he moved to Los Angeles at the age of 19) which occasionally flattens out into actorly R.P.

His clothes are neat and orderly – smart checked shirt, blue pullover, dark jeans – and he talks with a crispness to match. But his train of thought is more like a dodgem, twirling on the spot before suddenly tearing off, spitting blue-white sparks in its wake.

At 17, on Christmas Eve, he was spotted in the Newcastle branch of JD Sports by a production manager for the BBC children’s drama, Byker Grove, and given a role – a lucky break he explains with a (word-perfect) quotation from Thoreau: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” (He was buying a last-minute present for his older brother, and drunk.)

Hunnam’s latest creative sortie – punishing, ambitious, and arguably completely mad – had him marching off the edge of the map. It’s 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 Lt Col Percy Fawcett, an English explorer whose expeditions through South America in the early 20th century became the stuff of legend. Fawcett was driven by the belief, based on his own discoveries and historical testimony, that somewhere in the Amazon jungle lay the ruins of an ancient culture whose existence would blow apart all received wisdom about savagery and civilisation. It became his life’s mission to find it.

As with Ritchie’s King Arthur, Hunnam wasn’t Gray’s first choice. Brad Pitt and Benedict Cumberbatch were both previously attached to the lead role, but Gray’s grand intentions for the piece threw up scheduling problems that eventually forced both to drop out. In the spirit of Fawcett, he wanted to shoot on location in the South American rainforest, on great tree-stumpsized reels of 35mm film stock that would have to be transported by raft.

“I had this acute sense that this was the opportunity I’d been building towards my whole career,” says Hunnam. So it was that in September 2015, he, Gray and their fellow cast and crew members arrived in northern Colombia, loaded their kit on to a flotilla of small cargo boats on the Río Don Diego, and snaked their way upriver.

The two months that followed were, he says, “a real challenge”. They were chased by black caimans – the Mel Gibson of crocodiles – and pinned down by tropical storms. (“Bolts of lightning were hitting trees 25ft from us!” he marvels. “It was exhilarating.”) In week two, an insect crawled into his ear and ate part of his eardrum. Sets were washed away by flash floods.

Hunnam lost almost three stone during the shoot, partly by design. He’d arrived in muscle-bound King Arthur mode (Gray turned white at

During filming, an insect crawled into his ear and ate part of his eardrum

Muscled in: Hunnam, left, had to fight for his role in Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur