Deadline.com— Apple TV+’s drama series Shantaram, starring Charlie Hunnam, will not be returning for a second season. Its Season 1 finale, to be released tomorrow, December 16, will serve as a series finale.
Based on Gregory David Roberts’ epic, 900-plus-page novel, Shantaram was an ambitious, big-scope undertaking, shot across two continents, that was impacted by the pandemic.
The series had shot two episodes before pausing filming in late February 2020. Because of its expansive nature requiring filming in multiple countries, the series did not resume production on the remaining 10 episodes until May 2021.
Shantaram, which hasn’t generated the level of buzz some of Apple TV+’s popular titles have, follows Lin Ford (Hunnam), who escapes a maximum-security Australian prison, reinvents himself as a doctor in the slums of 1980s Bombay, gets entangled with a local mafia boss and eventually uses his gun-running and counterfeiting skills to fight against the invading Russian troops in Afghanistan. All the while he is falling for an enigmatic and intriguing woman named Karla (Antonia Desplat) and must choose between freedom or love and the complications that come with it.
The series also stars Shubham Saraf, Elektra Kilbey, Fayssal Bazzi, Luke Pasqualino, Alyy Khan, Sujaya Dasgupta, Vincent Perez, David Field, Alexander Siddig, Gabrielle Scharnitzky, Elham Ehsas, Rachel Kamath, Matthew Joseph and Shiv Palekar.
Before getting a greenlight at Apple TV+ as a series, Roberts’ book had been the subject of multiple unsuccessful attempts to turn it into a movie franchise, led by Johnny Depp.
The Shantaram series was written and executive produced by showrunner Steve Lightfoot. Bharat Nalluri directed and executive produced. Andrea Barron, Nicole Clemens, Steve Golin, Justin Kurzel and Eric Warren Singer, who co-created the series with Lightfoot, also executive produced. The series was produced for Apple by Paramount Television Studios and Anonymous Content’s AC Studios.
EW.com — Charlie Hunnam wants to know what happens to his character Lin Ford after Shantaram’s brutal season 1 finale cliffhanger just as much as you do. But it might be a while until we find out what happens next, because the star/producer of Apple TV+’s drama doesn’t have any news to share on whether or not the adaptation of Gregory David Roberts’ 2003 international best-selling novel will return for a second season (Shantaram was canceled after this interview was conducted).
“It’s unlike working for a traditional network which I’d been used to doing, where there was some sort of indication of if anyone was watching the show or not — it’s not how streaming platforms work — so it’s a little bit bittersweet in that season 1 is coming to an end,” Hunnam tells EW. “Out on the streets, I get a sense that people are enjoying it and watching it, and creatively for me, it feels satisfying that we actually managed to get to the finish line and now all of the episodes have aired and I just hope people actually enjoyed it.”
The season 1 finale almost ended with Lin getting his happy ending with Karla (Antonia Desplat) after surviving the bloody gang war and evading Nightingale (David Field). They planned to leave the city together after finally confessing their love for each other, but when Lin arrived at the train station to meet up with Karla, he was caught and taken to a dark cell. The finale closes on a shot of Lin being violently beaten while tied up in the cell as Karla cries on the train, thinking Lin changed his mind and didn’t want to leave with her.
Below, Hunnam breaks down that tragic finale ending and more.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What have you thought about the response to the show now that all the episodes are out?
CHARLIE HUNNAM: People seem to have really appreciated that it felt grounded and quite authentic. The hope was, for those people who’ve not been lucky enough to experience Asia and India in particular, that they felt like they were transported and had an opportunity to feel that environment and the beauty of that part of the world. That’s been really, really satisfying. And as the season has gone along and built up the question of what will happen between Lin and Karla, that’s been really satisfying — it seems as though people got quite excited and invested in that relationship.
And then, of course, what I already knew would happen is that Shubham [Saraf], who plays Prabhu, just has been getting an unbelievably positive response. He’s my really good pal and I felt so grateful and excited to have him in the show and be such a partner in crime with him. I have just been delighted that he’s been getting such a positive response. We really, really loved each other. We got on so well and deeply connected.
The finale ends with Lin captured as Karla leaves without him, unaware he was caught at the station just a few feet away from her. Why end the season there?
I had a really wonderful, deep collaboration with Steve Lightfoot, our showrunner. That was really his decision, but thankfully he was very eager to get my insights in how I felt about some of the decisions he was making. We both knew the novel so well and we talked a lot about allowing the novel to dictate the moves that we were making. The point that we reached by the end of the first season, it just felt, the more we read it and discussed it, like the obvious point to end this chapter of the story. Lin going from incarceration to, presumably, back into incarceration felt like a very elegant arc for the first season and hopefully a fairly dynamic point to start the second season, if I’m lucky enough to go back for a second season.
How does coming so close to getting a happy ending with Karla before it gets ripped away affect Lin going into a second season?
This is no indication of decisions that have been made, but my sense is that, through the course of the first season, Lin goes from being a fairly normal, average person who’s at the mercy of the forces around him. Though he has a sense of who he is, it’s not like a classic hero on a hero’s journey where he’s full of agency and a sense of conviction of what he wants with his life. He’s more leaf in the wind being blown this way and that. My sense is, by the end of season 1, he is no longer willing to be just completely vulnerable to the forces around him, that instead he is going to march to the beat of his own drum and decide that the chips fall where they may.
There’s a moment at the very, very end where the camera’s pretty close to Lin and you get the sense that, although he’s tied up and being beaten, he is still owning his space and refusing to bow down to the circumstances that he finds himself in. Moving forward, hopefully we allow Lin to have a much greater sense of conviction and agency over the trajectory of his life.
NYTimes.com — Seven years ago, the British actor Charlie Hunnam took a book with him on an overseas vacation and was so engrossed that he didn’t get around to sightseeing.
“I literally did not see one vista of Thailand,” he said, and it was because of “Shantaram,” Gregory David Roberts’s 2003 novel about a bank robber who escapes an Australian prison and takes refuge in a Mumbai slum. “I was exclusively in India for that trip, with my nose in the book.”
With that, his friend, the screenwriter Eric Warren Singer, succeeded in turning Hunnam onto his obsession — adapting “Shantaram.”
Others had spent years trying. Warner Brothers had acquired the rights, with Johnny Depp slated to star as the robber, Lin Ford. But directors and screenwriters had come and gone, and Depp took on other work. When the rights finally became available, Singer and Hunnam’s team was outbid but ultimately won the creative pitch.
Now Hunnam is playing Lin in the Apple TV+ series, and Singer is billed as a co-creator with Steve Lightfoot.
In the end, timing was everything.
“I was entering my mid-30s and was asking some bigger questions about the nature of God and what my journey was turning out to be,” Hunnam said in a phone interview from Toronto, where he was on a press tour. While Lin’s quest was extraordinary, he added, “had this come to me two or three years earlier, I wouldn’t have had the same reactions.”
Hunnam, who is moving into writing and producing, plans to spend the next six months creating a series that he couldn’t talk about. But he spoke openly about a few things that rule his world — opinion-free news, the Lake District in England and his iPod — and pondered his final resting place.
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
1. “Bloomberg Surveillance”
I’m appalled by the nature of modern journalism and quote-unquote the news. There’s a lot of conjecture, there’s a lot of opinion, and there’s too little facts. I want to know what’s going on, but I want that information to be given to me in a fairly neutral way. “Bloomberg Surveillance” is looking at the world exclusively through the lens of the economy. I find that much more palatable than being told that this politician is the devil and that one is Jesus reincarnated.
2. Cats
I have a strange sense that maybe I was born in the wrong form — you know, maybe I was born a cat in a human body — because outside of my parents and my current partner, my most important relationship was with my cat George that I had for 19 years. And I constantly run into cats. I ended up buying a piece of land in central California because this magnificent female mountain lion was living there. I hope that this doesn’t end up in disaster, but I am making a fairly reckless plan to become friends.
3. Van Morrison, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen
Waits excites my imagination as much if not more than any other artist. Morrison is a king of sad, melancholy nostalgia. And the summer of being 14 or 15, I found marijuana for the first time, and I found Leonard Cohen. There was something about that summer that told me who I wanted to be — that there was a world out there that I wanted to gravitate toward. It was a sense of coming to life in a way that art can invoke.
4. “Tribe” by Sebastian Junger
Junger goes on this journey of exploration to understand PTSD because he’d been embedded as a war correspondent — recognizing that PTSD is not only about the trauma, it’s about the experience and loss of that. Where he comes down is ultimately the importance of community and collective experience. Isolation is the recipe for disaster.
5. The Lake District in England
I grew up in Newcastle and was very popular until I was 12 years old. Then I went across the country to a place that was far less cosmopolitan. My first day, this kid two years older than me blocks my path, and he was asking, “New boy, where’d you come from?” I was getting a bit nervous, and he said, “Do you want a go?” And I said yes. I didn’t know that that was colloquial for fighting. So he punched me straight in the face. That was how that five years in the district continued: just an absolute crucible of violence and isolation. But I had this extraordinary natural wonder literally on my doorstep. I took to the mountains, walking and planning what my life was going to be when I was old enough to live it on my own terms. Continue reading Press/Interview: Charlie Hunnam Discusses Being a Cat Person, His Appreciation For His iPod and More with The New York Times
Disclaimer: This post only displays direct quotes and questions to and from Charlie. There were some questions left out intentionally as they were directed to other cast members.
Q: Charlie, one of the thing that is so engaging in your character is that he’s a man who’s full of juxtapositions. He’s not afraid to get himself into certain situations. At the same time, there is a real softness and delicacy and he’s very emotionally driven as well. Can you talk about your development process in crafting him?
CH: That’s a good question. One of the things I was very focused on was trying to make him as neutral as possible. It was one of the things I felt we could take a little bit of liberty with, departing from the source material. When you meet him initially in the novel, he’s already succumbed to the dark side. I wanted him to be very neutral — relatable and accessible, just like if any one of us had made a horrible mistake that derailed the whole trajectory of our life, so that — he wasn’t carrying a lot of baggage, or wearing a lot of armor.
Steven [Lightfoot], our creator and writer, talked about that a lot. It was really more about the world keeping on tripping him over, that idea of the way positive and negative feedback loops work, that this one mistake led to a series of mistakes that get him deeper and deeper into a hole that he has to try to climb out of.
Q: Charlie and Shubham, you guys crafted this friendship on screen, and it allows for moments of lightness and levity even when they’re in the midst of potential danger or death in situations, and still laughing and joking around with each other. So tonally, how did you find that balance of allowing for the grittier emotional sides of the characters, at the same time allowing for that light playfulness between the two of them?
CH: I really played off Shubham a lot. I attribute a lot of that to the energy that Shub’s brought to who he is and his interpretation of the character. I felt very much that, because of the position that Lin is in in the early episodes, he’s not really in a position to feel a great deal of identity or certainty about who he is. So in this sort of neutral space that I was really interested in exploring, who he was, how the company that he was in, reflected his behavior. He’s really sort of subconsciously trying to ingratiate himself into the environment and the social groups that he was finding himself exposed to.
SS: Well, it was a sort of paint-and-canvas situation. There was what I enjoyed doing with Charlie — and I think you enjoyed [it]. What we enjoyed was having a good time no matter what. No matter what as actors, no matter how hard it was, how tired we were, we were trying to have a good time.
Because it’s hard — thirteen hours a day, six days a week. So we were really going for that, and I think that bled into the characters. I think that’s very much the case with Prabhu, that he arguably has the worst [circumstances] out of anyone. He lives in a slum, he’s literally trying to make a buck so that he can put a meal on his plate.
So he’s going through it and his survival technique is, when a human is pushed to that level of adversity, your survival is to try and have the best time you can. The harder life gets, the more you need to survive, the more you need to try really hard to have a good time. I think the moments that were slightly more emotional — gritty, as you said — happened not because we were trying to, but more like we were trying to not have them, and then they come more as a surprise. That’s what I think happens more in real life; you’re never trying to be that, you’re trying not to be that. And then something happens and you’re sad.
Q: When he first meets Lin, it’s a kind of transaction that’s happening between the two of them, and an opportunity for him. For you, what was the tipping point, or the changing point, where it goes from being a transactional business opportunity into a real friendship and a real place of connectivity for him?
SS: The first scene we found, which was when he comes to my house and I feed him my food and we drink whiskey together and we swear together. That was another moment when the actors bled into the characters, which bled into the story which was, we had met each other before, we were acting for the first time together, and I was just vibing off him.
CH: We shot this — unfortunately, we had to block shoot the whole twelve episodes because we were shooting between Australia and Thailand, and we lost one of our directors in Covid and everything. So we had to start shooting all twelve episodes simultaneously, which meant that there were a lot of the end of the journey at the beginning of relationships, and stuff happening in a way that you wouldn’t usually schedule, at least if you were trying to be somewhat thoughtful of your actors. Continue reading Press/Interview: The Cast of ‘Shantaram’ Sit Down for a Q&A With Cinema Daily US
HollywoodReporter.com — Charlie Hunnam is famous for his acting chops, a nearly 100-episode run on FX’s Sons of Anarchy and two dozen credits on everything from buzzy series to films of both the blockbuster and independent varieties. But the actor says he has every intention of soon being known as something else.
Introducing Charlie Hunnam, the screenwriter.
“I’m trying to pivot basically full-time after Shantaram into becoming a writer,” he told The Hollywood Reporter recently, referencing the Apple TV+ series he toplines based on the Gregory David Roberts epic novel.
There’s one caveat: “I’m by no means going to stop acting but I’m going to try and only act in things that I write.”
He’s off to a head start. Hunnam reports that he’s hard at work on a handful of projects including some feature screenplays as well as miniseries that he wrote and set up at an undisclosed studio and a TV show set in his hometown of Newcastle, England that is loosely based on his late father, a scrap metal merchant, and others he grew up around.
“I’m starting to get some real traction and I hope to unveil some of this stuff over the next couple of years.”
