Saturday morning at Claridge’s and it’s kedgeree o’clock. Mr Charlie Hunnam ambles in for our breakfast appointment in a private room at the back of the restaurant. For an actor who played a pumped – and frequently topless – biker for seven seasons of US TV drama Sons Of Anarchy, and who this year is filling the big screen as a mythic British king, a fabled early 20th-century explorer and a legendary convict escapee, the 36-year-old wears his charisma lightly. With his choppy hair, blonde stubble and elbow-patched, grey cotton shirt, Mr Hunnam looks more resting rocker than leading man. Fifty shades of grunge, anyone?

The Newcastle-born, LA-based actor studies the menu in the same quiet, thoughtful manner that, it transpires, he considers everything. He’ll have the vegetarian breakfast, please, with granary toast and a side of avocado. “I’m not a veggie,” clarifies Mr Hunnam in a soft Geordie accent still evident after 18 years in LA. “But I never see any point in meat at breakfast. I like a bit of smoked salmon, maybe a kipper. But I don’t do any sausages or bacon.”

I previously encountered Mr Hunnam in 2010, in his then-home on West Hollywood’s hipster thoroughfare, Melrose Avenue. He was about to begin filming the third series of Sons Of Anarchy. His was the hero role, that of Jax Teller, prodigal son of the founder of an outlaw Californian motorcycle chapter. Naturally lean, he bemoaned the gym time required to buff himself up to play the dynamic biker prince, and the concomitant loading up on white-meat protein. He was a long way from his breakthrough role, playing a callow, northern teenager in Mr Russell T Davies’ groundbreaking 1999 Manchester-set gay drama Queer As Folk.

“Now I realise that there are protein powders, vegan protein powders and all that shit,” Mr Hunnam says with a small smile of relief. “[Things] that feel a little kinder to the system rather than eating enormous amounts of solid protein every day.”

Even though he wrapped on the final 80-hours-per-week filming schedule of Sons Of Anarchy in 2014, fitness still matters to Mr Hunnam. But it’s the right kind of fitness.

“I have come to really like an active lifestyle,” says Mr Hunnam. “It was a bit of a challenge to begin with to find a routine that felt good. But equal to the physical rewards of feeling good and healthy and energised, just the mental clarity and emotional stability I find I get from working out have become pretty essential to my day-to-day life.”

A keen hiker, a legacy perhaps of a childhood spent in the Lake District, 18 months ago Mr Hunnam moved to a new home at the bottom of Runyon Canyon. “That’s lovely to have on the doorstep. I go up there most mornings about 6.00am, watch the sunrise. Sometimes double it up and go watch the sunset as well. And on my ambitious days, I do give it a bit of a run, but it’s usually just a fast walk.”

His neighbours are Ms Sam and Mr Aaron Taylor-Johnson. The first knock on the door to borrow a cup of sugar could have been problematic because, famously, at the 11th hour, Mr Hunnam dropped out of Ms Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades Of Grey film. In October 2013, it was announced that he was to play fabulously wealthy kink-merchant Christian Grey in the film adaptation of the gazillion-selling novel. A little over a month later, he quit. Northern Irish actor Mr Jamie Dornan gamely accepted the keys to the sex dungeon and disaster was averted. But it was a bruising time for all concerned.

Letting down Ms Taylor-Johnson, he admits, “was primarily the reason it was very, very difficult. And thankfully she is such a wonderful, kind, empathetic person, she understood. And we’ve actually remained friends.” Continue reading Mr. Porter: Mr Charlie Hunnam’s Life After Motorbikes

Forget the abs, forget the jawline, forget the massive fighting robots — Charlie Hunnam just wants to be taken seriously

Charlie Hunnam doesn’t do Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. “I am so baffled by the whole phenomenon of social media,” he says. “To me, it speaks to going the wrong direction, trying to fill up this gaping hole that we all have in us.” The English-born actor is sitting at a table in his “office,” an unfussy restaurant on the Sunset Strip. He’d arrived for our interview 10 minutes early, dressed in a gray sweatshirt and jeans, waving a familiar hello to the employees on his way in.

In the nine years since he first appeared on FX’s cult hit Sons of Anarchy, Hunnam, who turns 37 this month, has become a full-fledged Hollywood hunk. He has scruffy blond hair, pale blue eyes and abs that look like they were drawn on by somebody at Marvel Comics. But he doesn’t talk like that. “I’m not interested in what anyone had for breakfast or what they think of these shoes they’re wearing or where they’re on vacation,” he says, continuing the social media theme. “This instant ability to like, dislike and cast immediate snap judgments on things—and being encouraged to do so—proliferates into our everyday existence.”

We’re here to discuss Hunnam’s new movie, The Lost City of Z (April 14), from We Own the Night writer-director James Gray. In the film, he portrays Colonel Percy Fawcett, the real-life British explorer who ventured into the Brazilian jungle in the 1920s in search of a lost civilization. Next month, he’ll play the lead role in Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. It seems that Hunnam is not just an unusually well-spoken actor, but an unusually hardworking one. He shot both films within a few weeks of each other, an arduous schedule that cut him off from the outside world—including his partner, jewelry designer Morgana McNelis. During the four months he spent filming Lost City in Colombia and Ireland, he didn’t even call her on the phone—all the better to immerse himself in the role.

“I have an incredible girlfriend. We’ve been together 11 years, and she’s incredibly understanding of my obsession,” he says. “There is an enormous amount of compromise that we’ve both made. We’re not married. We don’t have kids. That’s exclusively because of my obsession to fulfill this sense of personal destiny.”

Personal destiny is an idea that’s generally applied to mythical figures—like, say, King Arthur—rather than film stars. But Hunnam has deliberately placed himself on the margins of the Hollywood scene. You won’t see tabloid reports of him partying at local hot spots. He likes to spend his time cooking, he says, watching movies or exploring nature. Even for Hunnam, though, sequestering himself in the South American jungle for months on end seemed a little extreme.

“I wasn’t trying to be overly bullish or anything,” he says, adding that the Percy Fawcett role “just took on an enormous amount of importance for me, in terms of proving to myself what I was capable of. It was an opportunity to go as deeply into the work as I’d always craved. I was not going to let anything prevent that opportunity from manifesting and being as full as it could possibly be.”

Hunnam may be even more amped up about his role in King Arthur, which ties into a childhood fantasy. As a boy, one of his favorite films was John Boorman’s Arthurian epic Excalibur. “I just watched that over and over,” he says. “I was always whittling sticks into swords and trying to engage my big brother in sword fights and stuff like that.” Ritchie’s version is an origin story, inflected with the snappy banter and visual trickery of his early gangster flicks Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. “I was really interested in King Arthur and what Guy was doing with it,” Hunnam says. “It felt like an observation or an exploration of the ego and how we tell ourselves terrible things and create demons within ourselves.” He describes working with Ritchie as “a very visceral, immediate experience.”

Continue reading Charlie Covers American Way Magazine April 2017 Issue