Category: Interviews
Articles Interviews Jungleland Press

Press: Charlie Hunnam On Choosing Vulnerable Roles, Becoming a Writer and Finding Inspiration in Joe Rogan

GQ.com — It’s startling how often Charlie Hunnam’s character loses in his new movie, Jungleland. Hunnam’s breakthrough role was in Sons of Anarchy, where he played a charming rogue who was often two steps ahead of everyone else. Since then, Hunnam mostly hasn’t strayed far from Jax Teller types—some have been more heroic, like his leading man turn in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, and others more homicidal, like this year’s Guy Ritchie gangster-fest The Gentlemen. But he’s never been quite as desperate as he is here playing Stanley, a perennially struggling hustler who hides behind a veneer of optimism and bets his entire future on his boxing younger brother, Jack.

Jungleland chronicles the brothers’ cross-country journey to an underground boxing tournament and the tests their relationship faces on the way, with a few crime bosses (Jonathan Majors, John Cullum) thrown in for good measure. Ten years ago, Hunnam would have likely played the sensitive brother with fists of fury, but he says that expectation is exactly what drove him towards the hapless manager instead. Hunnam wants to push into a new phase of his career: He turned 40 in April, and that milestone in combination with quarantine has reoriented his actor’s goals and priorities, and as he talked about them, his excitement was palpable.

When you look at the logline and see ‘Charlie Hunnam boxing movie,’ the immediate expectation is that you’re throwing the punches, not playing a guy who gets knocked out by a civilian dad in a pizzeria. This role is really unlike any I’ve seen you in before. I’m used to you playing characters who are more in control.

Yeah. I mean, you reach a certain age—I’m 40 years old. You stop playing the boxer and you start playing the manager. It’s just the natural cycle of life. I think that there are rhythms in one’s life and career, and things in my late twenties and early thirties that I was working through, certain aspects of my personality that I was interested in exploring through work. And I think [you’re] right. Growing up feeling like I didn’t have a lot of control and —I was a sensitive guy in a really tough environment. And so that created a bit of trauma and a little bit of self-loathing and I wanted to explore that and work through it in some of the characters that I was playing. But, thankfully I’ve worked through that and those types of character are just not quite as interesting to me anymore.

So what interested you about Stanley?

The environment that we were living in at the time that [Jungleland] got offered to me, where there was a lot of emphasis being put on toxic masculinity, I thought that there was just something really beautiful to explore about the genesis of where that comes from, men’s inability to be vulnerable with each other or to express love. Really, this whole film is about these two guys who desperately love each other. And, that gets expressed in wrong, inelegant ways.

There were several different elements of it. First and foremost, it’s always just the quality of the writing. [Stanley is] a character that I hadn’t seen very much and I thought it really just felt fresh and exciting. And then, there was something really beautiful and tender about their relationship and the clear love that these two men had for each other. Obviously there’s a lovely, traditional love story between the Jessica Barden and Jack O’Connell characters. But to me when I read it, I felt like the most central love story was really between these two brothers.

And to go back to what we were saying: Maybe I’ve been wearing a mask a little bit in some of the characters that I’ve been playing in my twenties and early thirties and there was just something very tragic and vulnerable about this family that I was really attracted to. It felt like there was more opportunity to just be a little bit more vulnerable, a little bit more raw.

Vulnerability and toxic masculinity are definitely more prevalent in this movie, but I feel like a lot of your past roles, even the action stuff like Sons of Anarchy, always made time to engage with those things.

I’m a relatively sensitive guy and take storytelling very seriously. I’m always looking for the opportunity in my work to try to find some truth. And that is really where acting gets exciting. I mean, with Sons of Anarchy, that was a guy who, had he been born into a different environment, would have had the potential to be a doctor, a photographer or a writer. There was something sensitive and very present about him and his own emotional awareness.

To a certain degree you have these aspirations to imbue characters with certain traits. But the material dictates it. And so sometimes in a show like Sons, you have to fight against the tides to try to get those moments in. That’s not exactly true because Kurt [Sutter] is a sensitive guy too and he was looking for those moments. But, you have to make a character as well-rounded as possible, so that he feels like a human being, even in a heightened environment like Sons.

What was your mindset going into this new chapter of your life, as you turn 40? How are you making choices now?

Well, one of the main things that I’m doing in my career right now is transitioning much more into writing and producing, which has been an aspiration of mine for many years. And I’ve been trying to do that in a very concentrated way, in the last five years. But there’s only so many hours in the day. And I realized that with all of the good intentions, there was just a reality to the bandwidth that I have on any given day.

In terms of specifically the things I want to explore, it’s really, really varied. And it’s often sort of story-specific. But just generally I’m very, very excited about writing. I’ve spent these last six to eight months writing five hours a week. I wrote a screenplay and I wrote a television show, a six-part television show. And right now I’m in the middle of writing a miniseries.

I’m creating opportunities for myself to act within that, but it’s funny—you get on this trajectory and one gets known for one’s work and it’s very easy for people to just say, ‘okay, we need a tough guy who can also be sensitive. Let’s see if Hunnam is interested.’ And it does take a very concentrated effort to recognize that and try to break out of it. So the joy of writing is that I know what’s in my heart and I also have a sense of what I will be able to do as an actor. I’ve not really been writing myself any tough guys and [instead] writing characters that are, I suppose, reflective of where I am in my life. They’re in that midpoint of life and career and wondering, ‘is this manifesting in exactly the way I hoped? And if not, what steps can be taken to course-correct and to arrive at the promised land?’

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Dec 16, 2020
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Articles Interviews Jungleland Press Shantaram

Press: Charlie Hunnam on ‘Jungleland,’ the Status of ‘Shantaram,’ & Why He Didn’t Do ‘Pacific Rim 2’

Collider.com — During this in-depth 1-on-1 chat with Collider, Hunnam tells us why he was drawn to playing Stanley, what it was like to get to know and work with O’Connell, and why he’s already looking to work with Winkler again. He also talked about the status of his Apple TV+ series Shantaram, whether he’d do another long-running TV show like Sons of Anarchy, whether he’s involved with the Pacific Rim Netflix anime series, and much more.

COLLIDER: What was it about Jungleland that drew you in? Was it the story, was it the character, was it the relationship between these brothers, or was it all of that?

CHARLIE HUNNAM: It’s a testament to Max [Winkler]’s great writing but it just felt like a fresh character, in terms of general film history. I didn’t feel like I’d seen a character like Stanley portrayed too many times but it was also specifically a very fresh character for me. Although there’s a lot of color and a heightened sensibility to the film (or at least more so on the page than the final results), it was clear that Max was really interested in exploring something specific about the way in which people, but men in particular, interact with each other. It was just very clear that, although there was the relationship with the love story between Jess Barden and Jack O’Connell’s characters, the central love story was between these two brothers and their abiding deep sense of loyalty and love that they have for each other, and their absolute inability to express it and demonstrate it, in any way that might mitigate some of the inevitable, impending catastrophe that was clearly on the horizon. I came from a very, very working-class, tough environment where men didn’t really interact with each other in a way that I found deeply satisfying. So there was something about that, that felt personal to me, and that I was interested in exploring.

When you read a script, in general, how quickly do you typically know when it’s something that you want to do and that you can bring something to, and how quickly did you know when reading this?

HUNNAM: Immediately. It’s a two-step process for me. I’ve read so many scripts, at this point, that I just know right away — really within the first few pages — if the quality of the writing is there or if you can feel that it’s gonna be thematically resonant. That immediately became clear but I wasn’t familiar with Max’s work. So the second threshold is always having faith and excitement and being inspired by the director. I went and watched his film Flower, which I thought was really, really unique and frisky. I felt he had a voice that I was excited about and the performances in Flower are very, very good. Obviously, so much of an actor’s performance is going to be predicated on the way the director handles you on set, and then handles the raw material once they get into the edit room.

So, both of those things in conjunction made it a no-brainer immediately. I read the script and watched the film, over the course of one day, and then calls and said, “I wanna meet with Max,” and told him in the room, “I wanna do this movie.” It was a pretty easy process, in that regard.

Was there a specific point where you went from being someone who was excited just to get a script to read, to being able to tell pretty quickly if it wasn’t something that you would want to do?

HUNNAM: Yeah. There have been many steps along the process to get to where I am now and I can see that there are many steps ahead of me and I would like to hopefully be able to cross several more thresholds to get to where I would optimally like to be as a performer and as part of a filmmaking team, but yeah, definitely. What I’m realizing now is how long it took for me to have the self-belief to advocate for myself and say, “I’m only gonna align myself with a certain caliber of people.”

It’s an ever-evolving scale but I feel very fortunate that I’m in the position that I’m in now, where I’m getting not only good quality material with good directors but also a diversity of roles. People are not just seeing me as a sensitive tough guy. They’re actually seeing that I have the capacity to do other things, too, which is really heartening and something that is becoming increasingly important to me. I went through a process of dealing with some personal shit that I had to go through and dealing with trauma from childhood through work. I was feeling scared and like a sensitive kid in a tough environment, and it created a lot of self-loathing, so I decided that I wanted to play all of these tough guys for a long time, to get past this trauma and this negative self-image that I’d created for myself from my childhood. I realize now that I’ve exercised those demons and don’t need to do that anymore, and I’m not really interested in doing that anymore.

As you have started to produce and write things for yourself, does that also change your perspective on how you read something or what you want to do?

HUNNAM: Yeah. It’s a bit cerebral but this year has been incredibly impactful for me. I want to preface that I, by no means, want to sound like anything that’s happened this year is a positive thing because it’s obviously been incredibly tough for everybody, but the isolation has afforded me the opportunity to sit down and do what I have come to term from the experience of doing it as my work, in a way that I’ve never really felt in the past. I’ve written, for the last seven months, 85 hours a week, and I’ve not taken a day off where I haven’t written a minimum of 12 hours a day. I wrote a six-part TV show, I wrote a film, and I’m now in the process of outlining a four-part miniseries. I’ve been really immersed in what I feel like is my career 2.0, and it really has been a deeply satisfying experience, in the clearest way I can experience it. I feel like truly, for the first time, that I’m doing my work.

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Dec 16, 2020
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Interviews Jungleland Press Video

Video/Photos: Charlie Visits Jimmy Kimmel LIVE!

On November 6th, Charlie appeared on Jimmy Kimmel LIVE! to promote his newest film Jungleland. In case you missed it you can watch his interview below and view high quality screen captures in the gallery now.

Screen Captures > 11/06/20 – Jimmy Kimmel LIVE
Nov 7, 2020
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Articles Interviews Press Sons of Anarchy

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.

Nov 5, 2020
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Articles Interviews Jungleland Press

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.”

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Nov 5, 2020
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Articles Interviews Jungleland Press

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.

Nov 5, 2020
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Interviews Photos Press

Photos: Charlie Covers January 2020 Issue of Candis Magazine

Charlie is featured on the cover of Candis Magazine for their January 2020 issue. Inside the issue you will find a in-depth interview with the man himself as he talks about his career, Brad Pitt, what he hopes people will recognize about his work and more. Give it a read, it’s worth it.

Scans from 2020 > Candis Magazine (January 2020)
Dec 20, 2019
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