Press: Charlie Hunnam Reflects on the Impact of ‘Sons of Anarchy’ 12 Years Later: “It Gave Me a Career”

Press: Charlie Hunnam Reflects on the Impact of ‘Sons of Anarchy’ 12 Years Later: “It Gave Me a Career”

People.com — Charlie Hunnam is reflecting on Sons of Anarchy’s impact over a decade after the series premiered.

Speaking to PEOPLE ahead of the release of his new film Jungleland, the 40-year-old actor opened up about how the hit FX drama launched his career.

“Well, frankly, it gave me a career,” Hunnam says. “And it gave me the ability to have confidence that I was going to be able to make [acting] work as a lifelong career.”

Hunnam starred as Jax Teller in the motorcycle gang show, which chronicled the lives of a close-knit motorcycle club that operated in a fictional Californian town. The series also starred Katey Sagal, Tommy Flanagan and Ron Perlman.

Looking back at his time on the show that made him a household name, the Newcastle, England native says it was almost like a college experience for him.

“I think I went into Sons of Anarchy being a pretty unaccomplished actor in terms of my skill set,” he says. “I wasn’t one of these people that were born enormously and innately talented. I had to really cultivate a skill set.”

“And where I cultivated a lot of that skill set was going to work and shooting 10 pages a day on Sons of Anarchy for seven years,” he continues. “I feel like that was my college days.”

Hunnam adds: “I went in knowing very little about the process of acting and came out knowing a little bit more.”

Now, six years after the series concluded, Hunnam says he’s often asked whether or not he would ever reprise his most famous role. But “I would never, ever put that cut back on,” he says. “I would never put his rings back on. Not even for Halloween.”

“It was a very deep experience,” he explains. “I lived with that character inside me for years, like, in a very real way. In a way that manifested in ways that I could never even [have] imagined.”

“He’s dead now,” he adds. “So there would be no ever bringing him back … When he died, he died.”

These days, Hunnam is now enjoying life and taking things day by day amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic with a renewed focus on creativity.

“I’ve been writing a great deal, which has been something that I’ve been sort of doing tangentially to my acting career for quite a while,” he says. “I’ve been writing 85 hours a week for the last seven months.”

Next up, in addition to Jungleland, Hunnam will head back to television screens with the previously announced series, Shantaram. And despite his many movie undertakings since the end of Sons of Anarchy, the actor notes that he does prefer TV roles over film ones.

“I really like long-form storytelling,” he says. “The experience of working with a group of actors for a long period of time is really, really exciting and rewarding.”

Jungleland opens in select theaters on Friday and hits video on demand platforms on Tuesday.

Press: Charlie Hunnam Says He Is ‘100 Percent’ Open to Playing James Bond: I Would Be ‘Flattered’

People.com — The name’s Hunnam. Charlie Hunnam.

While speaking to PEOPLE ahead of the release of his new film Jungleland, the 40-year-old actor opened up about future roles that he is interested in taking on and whether or not James Bond happens to be one of them.

Asked if he would ever be open to donning Bond’s tuxedo someday in the future, the Sons of Anarchy star says, “100 percent.”

“I would be so flattered and honored to be considered to play James Bond as an Englishman,” he adds. “But my intuition tells me that I shouldn’t be waiting for that phone call to come. I think there are many people ahead of me on that list.”

The actor characterized any rumors of him portraying the ever-popular spy as “external chatter,” adding it is sweet that fans want to see him take on the role that several other actors before him have — including the late Sean Connery.

“It’s very flattering sort of fan dialogue,” he says, before noting that there’s no truth to the rumors. “Nobody’s ever, on a professional level from within the industry, brought that up to me,” he explains.

Still, he encourages fans to keep associating his name with the role, as he says sometimes fans do play a role in helping to get actors cast to play certain characters.

“As much as people want to talk about me playing James Bond, please continue,” he shares. “Maybe that’s the genesis of these things. Maybe fan chatter leads to industry people actually talking about it in a more serious way.”

Even if he doesn’t come to play Bond one day in the future, Hunnam does have an actor in mind that could take over the mantle from Daniel Craig, who said that the upcoming Bond flick, No Time to Die, will be his last.

Hunnam tells PEOPLE Tom Hardy would make for a great spy.

“The person that I hear about in that conversation is Tom Hardy,” the actor says. “I hear that he’s really the front runner [to play James Bond next].”

He adds: “I think that would be sensational. I’m an enormous Tom Hardy fan so I would love to see him as James Bond.”

Continue reading Press: Charlie Hunnam Says He Is ‘100 Percent’ Open to Playing James Bond: I Would Be ‘Flattered’

Press: Charlie Hunnam Reveals the Real Reason He Turned Down ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’

Press: Charlie Hunnam Reveals the Real Reason He Turned Down ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’

Collider.com — Charlie Hunnam‘s new movie, Jungleland, sees him playing a rough-around-the-edges manager and coach to his younger brother (Jack O’Connell), a boxer looking for a break. When Collider’s own Christina Radish spoke with Hunnam recently about the movie and his role in it, their discussion took a brief detour into Hunnam’s past roles. In doing so, it reminded us of all the twists and turns his career has taken over the last 20 odd years that led him to this point, to Jungleland. Hunnam spoke to us about two of those big twists one being his brief run on the early ’00s TV comedy Undeclared. The other was a game-changing decision to not take a role in Forgetting Sarah Marshall — a decision he’s never spoken about until now.

But before we can share Hunnam’s incredible Forgetting Sarah Marshall story (which he says he revealed publicly to us for the first time ever), the actor spoke to us about working with Judd Apatow on the short-lived Fox comedy Undeclared. The show, which ran for the 2001-2002 season, followed a group of college freshmen through the highs and lows of college life. Hunnam played Lloyd, a suave lothario and roommate of Steven (Jay Baruchel), the show’s protagonist. Undeclared was Hunnam’s second major TV role to that point — following his role on the original British Queer as Folk — and his biggest step into comedy at that point, too. (Who better to guide you as a comedic actor than Apatow, eh?) Given his work history with Apatow on Undeclared, would Hunnam ever want to re-team with him on another project?

Yeah, it’s funny, I surprised myself, both of the things that I wrote this year, I wrote for myself and one of them is straight satire and the other one has got a very strong comedy component. So, yeah, when I sat down and started to write, my heart let me know that is certainly something that I want to pursue more. I don’t know specifically about that group. I would certainly work with Judd. I don’t know if he’d be interested in working with me. He has not demonstrated that desire, over the last few years. So, I think that might answer the question for us.”

When we joked that maybe Hunnam’s role as Jax Teller on FX’s Sons of Anarchy — his first major TV role post-Undeclared — was so off the beaten path of Apatow-esque entertainment that maybe it would scare the writer/director off, something seemed to click for Hunnam. To the joke, Hunnam answered with an intriguing story which eventually revealed why he had stepped away from the Apatow-produced 2008 comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall— reasons which have largely been unclear to this day.

“Maybe. It’s funny, I’ll tell you a little story. Jason Segel wrote Forgetting Sarah Marshall for he and I to do together, and he wrote that [Russell Brand] role [of Aldous Snow] for me. I went and I did the table read and it was very successful. Judd was producing. I was in a dark night of the soul in my career, at that point, and felt as though I needed to seize the trajectory and that just wasn’t really aligning with, at that period of my life and career, what I wanted to be doing. Jason was one of my best friends [the pair had worked together on ‘Undeclared’], which is why he wrote the film for me, but I had to tell him, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m not gonna do this.’ It was one of those things where that wasn’t very well received by the inner circle of that production. I had to stand my ground and say, ‘Listen, it’s nothing personal. I’m just following my North star. I’m just in a weird spot and I’m trying to define for myself what the path forward is.’”

After declining to tackle the Aldous Snow role, Hunnam realized he’d made the right decision. Not just because of the personal and professional reasons he shared with us, but because it was obvious to him that Russell Brand was the best choice. Hunnam went on to tell us about the moment of clarity he had about Brand playing Aldous in the months after stepping away from Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

“It was one of those things where it was really difficult for me for the few months after that or a year after that, and then I saw this piece of stand-up. I didn’t know who Russell Brand was, but I saw this piece of stand-up that Russell Brand did on Christmas day with my mom. It was just this liberating moment where I said, ‘Obviously, that’s the dude who should have been playing that role. Clearly, I just needed to step out of the way of the universe manifesting itself, the way that it was supposed to.’ My relationship with Jason gave birth to that character, but there’s no way I could have done it justice the way Russell Brand did. I think there’s a rhythm to these things and you just have to really follow your instincts. It’s all you can really ever do. I suppose I brought that up because it’s a nice example of my instincts being proven to me that it was correct, I think. By the way, I’ve never told anyone that story before. I don’t know if that makes it attractive or not — but it’s a world exclusive.”

While we may never know what Hunnam would have brought to the role of Aldous Snow, we have numerous other killer performances from the Brit made at the same time as, and after, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Hunnam took a huge leap in his career with the role of Jax Teller, playing the leader of a California biker gang from 2008 to 2014. Following his time on the gritty crime drama, Hunnam appeared in hits like Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak, and King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword. And you know what? That’s a pretty stellar trade-off if you ask me.

Jungleland is out on premium VOD beginning Tuesday, November 10.