CELEBRITIES
After hearing he was considered too skinny to play King Arthur, the actor flew to England to challenge a film director
British actor Charlie Hunnam got pushy when he learned he was considered too skinny to play King Arthur.
Neither director wanted him, but then they took a look at him and he opened his mouth. He was hungry and pushy, and director Guy Ritchie liked that. He was gorgeous and charmed women and children, and director James Gray liked that too.
Charlie Hunnam is not exactly a household name in the United States, at least not just yet.
He is known in some quarters as the guy who backed out of Fifty Shades of Grey. He is known in others as the conflicted capo of a California motorcycle gang in the FX series Sons of Anarchy. Four years ago, he starred in Guillermo del Toro’s
Pacific Rim, and a decade before that played a menacing albino Confederate in Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain. Across the pond, in his native England, he rose to fame as a teen, playing a coltish gay youngster in the breakout series Queer as Folk.
But all those parts did not make a breakout star of Hunnam, 37, not least because he has been enormously picky about roles. He once spent a few lean years living off an organic marijuana crop he cultivated in his Los Angeles home, he said, rather than taking jobs that left him cold.
“I can’t even believe I’m being this candid,” Hunnam said as he revealed his pot-growing days — they’re behind him now, he swears — over a lunch of seared halibut and spring peas at the Four Seasons in Lower Manhattan a few weeks ago.
Tall and V-shaped, blond and chiselled, Hunnam has been likened to Brad Pitt and Channing Tatum. Yet he didn’t carry the “here we go again” ennui or whiff of wariness that often permeates the air around celebrities. This despite the fact that he was in the thick of the press tour for King Arthur: Legend
of the Sword, the US$102 million film Ritchie directed and helped write, which launched in cinemas on May 12 with Hunnam as its star.
Scant weeks before, he had been out promoting Gray’s The
Lost City of Z, which he starred in too. By every appearance, the lean years are no more. Yet both films nearly eluded him.
Ritchie flatly refused to consider Hunnam for King Arthur at first, not least because he envisioned a king with an action-figure physique. “There’s more fat in a chip than there is on Charlie,” Ritchie said in an interview. “I just didn’t think he was robust enough.”
Infuriated, Hunnam flew to London from Los Angeles to force a meeting that Ritchie couldn’t say no to because Hunnam’s manager is his close friend. Looking back, Hunnam said he was not sure how much he wanted the role; he just wanted to be seen. Yet within five minutes, Ritchie said: “I knew I loved him.”
The director continued: “When someone’s hungry and pushy and they can back it up with something, then it’s a wonderful conspiracy.” Hunnam was smart, meticulous and dived deep. He also hit the gym like a madman and, soon enough, looked like He-Man.
This in turn dismayed Gray, when, eight days after wrapping King Arthur, Hunnam showed up for a costume fitting for
The Lost City of Z. The film is about Percy Fawcett, a real-life British explorer who disappeared in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for signs of an ancient civilisation.
Hunnam recalled that the director “looked in abject horror at my body and said, ‘This is a disaster, this is nowhere close to the physicality that we need for Fawcett.’” Hunnam added: “I just looked like a superhero, you know? Stupid.”
All of which he managed to blame on Pitt. When he took his shirt off in Fight Club and Snatch, Hunnam said, he created “a new expectation of what a man should be”.
That said, Pitt was the one who got Hunnam the part of Fawcett. Pitt’s production company, Plan B, had tapped Gray, whose previous films include The Yards and We Own the Night, to write and direct the picture.
Pitt was to star but dropped out because of scheduling conflicts; then the lead was to be Benedict Cumberbatch, but his wife was about to give birth. Plan B suggested Hunnam, at which point Gray balked.
“I thought he was a Hells Angels kind of guy, which makes me feel like an absolute fool beyond comprehension,” Gray said in a phone chat.
After learning Hunnam was British, Gray invited him over for dinner, making spaghetti and meatballs, which Hunnam dutifully ate even though, as Gray later learned, he avoids carbs.
“He was so warm and funny. My wife thought he was handsomest man in the world, and my son was obsessed with him,” Gray said. “Lost City of Z is all about feelings of inadequacy about class. He understood all that stuff and spoke to it directly.”
For Gray, that was key. Like his character in the film, Hunnam burned with the need to prove himself.
Hunnam grew up in a struggling former coal-mining hub, Newcastle upon Tyne, in northeast England, which makes him a Geordie, the nickname for people from that region and their dialect — “dead” sounds like “deed”, “crown” like “croon”. His parents split when he was two and although Charlie and his older brother lived with their mother, his father loomed large. Respected and feared, Billy Hunnam was a sharp-dressing scrap metal dealer who, his son said, largely operated outside the law and left young Charlie in awe. “He was a titan among men in that town,” Hunnam said.
Yet while his father had off-the-books wealth, he gave little money to Charlie, his brother or their mother, something Hunnam bears no resentment about.
“In his immortal words,” Hunnam recalled, “he said to my mum, ‘Look, if I’m not going to be there to teach my sons to be men, then poverty will teach them to be men.’”
Whatever ambition poverty might have fuelled in Hunnam was boosted by his angelic looks. After being spotted in a shop, he was cast in a television series, and then later, when he was 18, as a 15-year-old seduced by Aidan Gillen, then 30, in the British series Queer as Folk, which ignited controversy for its racy gay sex scenes (and predated the US version).
“It was obvious to me he was going to wait for interesting roles to come along, and you can be waiting for a long time,” said Gillen, who plays Littlefinger in Game of Thrones and who also stars in King Arthur. “He hasn’t made it particularly easy for himself.”
At 18, he entered a short marriage to actress Katharine Towne and then moved to California, where he developed a much discussed hybrid accent. He was offered a few good roles and plenty of terrible ones, and turned to writing screenplays — selling one, about Vlad the Impaler, to Summit Entertainment and Plan B — and the aforementioned pot, which he sold to a medical dispensary.
Then Sons of Anarchy came along. Kurt Sutter, who created the series, said he saw a movie star in Hunnam, one who grasped outlaw culture (his father Billy’s doing) and who was also hypercritical of himself (Hunnam later said he’s hypercritical of everything). “It’s the kind of insane unobtainable need for perfection,” Sutter said. “His methodical ascension wasn’t an overnight pretty-boy success. It was mounting a body of work for the right reasons.”
Sons of Anarchy ran from 2008 to 2014, and its final season broke rating records for FX. In 2013 he was cast as the kinky heartthrob in Fifty Shades of Grey. Having hit it off with the film’s director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, he envisioned Christian Grey as an Elon Musk-type laser-focused on amassing power. But he bowed out of the project. His father had died just months earlier — “life caught up with him,” Hunnam said — and he was about to appear in del Toro’s film Crimson Peak.
While Hunnam publicly claimed exhaustion, he said in the interview he also realised the studio did not share his vision. “I thought, ‘I’m just not going to have the time or the energy to fight the fight to get this thing what I want it to be,’” he said. He would later hear about the highly publicised strife that emerged on set. “I’m glad that I wasn’t stuck in the middle of a conflict like that,” he said. “There’s no regrets.”
Hunnam has since added yet another feather to his cap; he starred, with Rami Malek, in the remake of Papillon, which wrapped production this past December.
But he can’t, or won’t, breathe easy yet.
First, with the King Arthur tour’s end in sight, he feels himself staring into an abyss. He’s long grappled with existentialism and, left to his own devices, can get overwhelmed, depressed. And he also struggles with reintegrating into off-set life, which includes his long-term relationship with jewellery designer Morgana McNelis.
“On set is the only time life fully makes sense, that I feel connected to the rhythm of my life and what it all means,” he said. Once that’s over, he added: “That thing that was filling me up is gone. And so in its wake is a giant hole that screams out every day ‘please fill me’.”
He also knows his time at the summit might be fleeting. “The fear of ‘Is it going to happen?’ just immediately gets replaced with ‘Is it going to be temporary?’” he said.
By all indications, his boomlet has not gone to his head. One recent night in New York, Ritchie invited Hunnam to join a bunch of friends for a nice dinner. Hunnam replied thanks, but he was already eating dinner, by himself, in a sushi joint a few blocks away.