Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek’s ‘Papillon’ Is “Somewhat of a Love Story”

Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek’s ‘Papillon’ Is “Somewhat of a Love Story”

Variety.com — When the autobiographical novel “Papillon” was published in France in 1969, it was hailed as “the greatest adventure story of all time” — and that description set the tone of the 1973 film adaptation starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman as two prisoners trying to escape a penal colony in Guiana.

But Michael Noer, the Danish director of a new remake starring Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek taking on the parts played by McQueen and Hoffman, respectively, says he had more than an action/buddy movie in mind while shooting the real-life drama about Parisian safecracker Henri “Papillon” Charrière (Hunnam), who was framed for murder and formed an unlikely friendship with counterfeiter Louis Dega (Malek) while planning his escape from the penal colony in the 1940s.

Noer envisioned an unlikely love story of inmates-turned-soulmates.

“That was the first thing I wrote on the side of the pages as I was skimming through the script: The chance to make not only a film about friendship but also a film about love,” Noer told Variety on Sunday night before a screening at the London West Hollywood hotel. “Because in friendship you can say that you’re bound only to a certain extent, but in love, you’re bound good and bad. You can hurt each other much more than you can just in a friendship. It starts off with they detest each other, [then] try to build a friendship and at the end, I’d say that they’re molded together into one. This is told through the lead, Charlie, and Rami, as supporting, but they’re both extremely important in creating this bond. Because I truly believe that they are one.”

Granted, heads do roll in “Papillon” (French for butterfly) due to the guillotine, but more importantly, hearts flutter between the co-stars.

“One thing Charlie and I looked at [was] ‘You know, we could do a prison escape movie, which is entertaining, and that’s the deal here — we have to entertain — but at the same time to have something going on where two human beings are searching for themselves and [it’s] somewhat of a love story,” Malek said. “The desire and need to be with one another, to overcome certain aspects of themselves, and to discover what it is to have hope and joy.”

While Noer doesn’t shy away from sex, as well as affection, between male convicts, it’s not quite a tropical “Brokeback Mountain” either. Hunnam, however, appreciates his director’s description as a love story between two men.

“I think that’s really accurate,” he said. “For me, what I’ve always been very interested in is the human condition and how we overcome adversity in our lives. Because as all of the religious teachers have taught us: We’ll have to encounter enormous hardship and tragedy and injustice and disappointment and, you know, broken hearts in our lives. That can become overwhelming — I feel that very acutely in society now as much as, if not more than, ever.”

“The question is: How do you weigh the balance?” Hunnam added. “And so I thought this was a really interesting and grand backdrop to explore that fundamental question: How do you make life make sense in the face of the inevitable, axiomatic rule that life is suffering? And so it’s about friendship and belief and faith and love. Those things — like community and friendship and within that, the love that comes — is of paramount importance. And ultimately that’s the message of this film.”

As it turns out, the male bonding blossomed into bromance off the red carpet, too: Before taking his seat in the front row of the theater, Malek couldn’t resist spanking his co-star on the bum.

Charlie Hunnam Reveals the Shocking Weight He Got Down to to Play Escaped Prisoner in ‘Papillon’

ETOnline.com — Charlie Hunnam underwent a pretty dramatic transformation for his latest film.

ET caught up with the 38-year-old actor and his co-star, Rami Malek, at the Los Angeles premiere of Papillon on Sunday, where they discussed Hunnam’s shocking weight loss in order to play a prisoner detained on a remote island who is attempting to escape. The transformation was made all the more mind-blowing because Hunnam had just dropped a significant amount of weight for a previous movie role.

“I did this two times in a row. I did a film called The Lost City of Zedd and I lost 40 pounds for that exactly. I went from 185 to 145 exactly,” Hunnam told ET’s Lauren Zima. “I was down to 145 again for this [role], but I think I probably started at 180 so maybe [I lost] like 35 pounds.”

While the dedication to his craft is certainly appreciated, Malek confessed that he was actually a bit worried about his co-star while they were acting out such “brutal circumstances.”

“Yeah, how can I not be? I mean it’s a very intense experience as it is. Filmmaking, and this one especially, it’s not the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. We weren’t out there going back to our trailers every two seconds,” Malek said. “It’s just out there sitting in the mud and hanging out and watching Charlie starve. So, I was a bit concerned, but he’s alright.”

Known for always being in shape, Hunnam often finds himself shirtless in his roles, but that’s not something he wants to continue in future projects.

“It’s certainly not intentional and not something that I want to keep doing, but it seems to be a running theme,” the former Sons of Anarchy star admitted. “I don’t know what that’s about.”

Hunnam hasn’t just cut weight for roles, he’s worked hard to put on weight too! Last year, he packed on 20 pounds of muscle to play King Arthur in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

J.C. Chandor’s Crime Thriller ‘Triple Frontier’ Set to Begin Filming March 26th

J.C. Chandor’s Crime Thriller ‘Triple Frontier’ Set to Begin Filming March 26th

Variety.com — Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal and Adria Arjona are starring in J.C. Chandor’s crime thriller, the long-in-development project known as “Triple Frontier.”

Netflix announced Monday that the currently untitled project begins shooting March 26 in Hawaii. It will also shoot in California and Colombia.

The film will be set in South America as five friends reunite to take down a drug lord, unleashing a chain of unintended consequences.

Chandor, whose credits include “All is Lost” and “A Most Violent Year,” will shoot from a script that he rewrote from Mark Boal. Boal’s credits include “Zero Dark Thirty” and “The Hurt Locker.”

Producers are Charles Roven, Alex Gartner and Andy Horwitz for Atlas Entertainment. Executive producers are Thomas Hayslip, Neal Dodson and Anna Gerb.

The project has been in development since 2010. The “Triple Frontier” title comes from the notorious border zone between Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil where the Iguazu and Parana rivers converge — making the area difficult to monitor and a haven for organized crime.

Actors such as Tom Hanks, Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Channing Tatum, and Mahershala Ali have been tied to the project at various points, and Kathryn Bigelow was initially attached as the director. Netflix took over the project last year from Paramount.

Charlie Joins Billy Bob Thornton in ‘Million Little Pieces’ Movie

HollywoodReporter.com — Charlie Hunnam is also boarding the adaptation of the infamous book by James Frey.

Billy Bob Thornton, Blade Runner 2049 actress Carla Juri and Charlie Hunnam have joined Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the adaptation of A Million Little Pieces.

Sam Taylor-Johnson, who directed 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey, is behind the camera for the adaptation of the James Frey best-seller that is being financed by Brad Weston’s Makeready Films.

Weston is producing along with The Picture Company partners Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman.

The book was for years set up at Warner Bros. but husband-and-wife team Taylor-Johnson extricated it. The book became controversial after Frey was exposed for inventing or embellishing parts of the story that was originally dubbed a memoir.

Frey wrote about a young man, ostensibly himself, who awakens on an airplane to Chicago, with no recollection of his injuries or of how he ended up on the plane. He then heads to a rehab and begins his journey to sobriety.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is the man at the center of the story with Thornton playing a mafia boss whom he meets at a recovery clinic and becomes a lifeline.

Juri is playing the movie’s female leads, a crack and heroin addict who falls in love with the man.

Hunnam will play Frey’s brother.

Thornton is coming off a Golden Globe win for this work in TV’s Goliath; the Globe was his second after his acclaimed work in season one of FXs Fargo. He is repped by WME, Media Talent Group and Myman Greenspan.

In addition to Blade Runner, Juri recently starred as the title character in Dear Agnes. She is repped by UTA, Anonymous Content and Independent Talent Group.

Charlie Reveals the Last Surprise He Gave His Girlfriend: ‘I Try to Keep Romance on the Reg’

Charlie Reveals the Last Surprise He Gave His Girlfriend: ‘I Try to Keep Romance on the Reg’

For Charlie Hunnam, it’s the little things that make for a happy relationship.

At the Toronto International Film Festival, where his new film Papillon is having its world premiere, the Sons of Anarchy star, 37, opened up about how he and his longterm girlfriend Morgana McNelis, 34, have kept their love strong for over a decade.

“I try to keep the romance on the reg,’” he told PEOPLE, Entertainment Weekly and InStyle at the festival on Friday. “I’ve been with my girlfriend 11 years, and as anyone knows, it’s been a long-term, fully monogamous relationship that requires work, a lot of work.”

And that work doesn’t always need to come in grand gestures. “Before I came away to TIFF I ended up staying until 5 in the morning because I decided I was going to clean the entire house.”

He also took care of “all the grocery shopping” and “all of the laundry,” chores Hunnam says are usually “stuff that we just share and both do all the time.”

“I thought it’d be nice for her to come home to everything immaculate and done,” Hunnam says.”I put flowers in the bedroom and in the kitchen, so she came home and was happy.”

For his new movie, Hunnam teams up with Mr. Robot’s Rami Malek to tackle roles originally played by Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in the 1973 film of the same name. The film is an adaption of Henri Charrière’s memoir, which tells the story of his imprisonment and repeated escapes from the infamous prison colony of Devil’s Island.

Source: People.com