Zap2it: Has the frequently dark tone of “Sons of Anarchy” caused you to take your portrayal of Jax home with you?
Charlie Hunnam: I think one of the skill sets that I’ve really developed over the course of doing this show with Kurt (Sutter, the series’ creator and executive producer) is trying not taking the work home as much as possible. I am not able to sustain Jax’s life. He’s a better man than I — which is not to say that I don’t go home in a bad mood or a good mood, but it’s usually more to do with how I feel I did that day.
If I’m happy with the work I did, I’ll usually go home with a little bit of a spring in my step. Or if I feel like I totally f***ed it up, I’ll go home completely despondent. But in terms of the actual narrative itself, I’ve no desire to go off into a lighter world. I kind of enjoy working in kind of the heightened world of big drama.
Zap2it: How do you think we find Jax as “Sons of Anarchy” starts to wind down its run in this final season?
Charlie Hunnam: Jax is in a very kind of schizophrenic state, I think. I mean, he’s obviously very, very sad and vulnerable and kind of broken, but there’s a huge amount of vengeance and anger in his heart.
So I think, in a kind of way, all of that processing — at least in the very beginning — is kind of to have a bit of a numbing effect. I think that he knows what he wants to do and that he knows that that’s where all of his energy is going to go, but he can’t get away from the fact that the love of his life has just been taken from him.
Source: zap2it.com
Category: Press
Check out the preview for the Sept. 30th episode of Sons of Anarchy in of TV Guide Magazine!
Magazines / Publications > TV Guide Magazine (September 22nd, 2014)
How long will it be before Jax realizes the truth about Gemma’s involvement in Tara’s murder on Sons of Anarchy? — Chris
Don’t expect it to happen any time soon. “Gemma is trying to juggle that lie, deal with the remorse and the guilt of that lie… and I just felt like that tension is really great,” creator Kurt Sutter says of dragging out the reveal. “If and when Jax gets that information about Gemma, there’s not a lot of things that can happen other than his reaction, the heartbreak of that and what does he do in that moment. There’s not a lot of room for anything else after that.” Still, Gemma will get a jolt when she realizes that Unser is investigating Tara’s murder.Source: tvguide.com
NYTimes.com — The premiere of the final season of the FX drama “Sons of Anarchy” scored the best ratings of any program in the 20-year history of the cable channel, with 9.25 million viewers between the live telecast and three days of playback.
The show also attracted 6.1 million viewers among the 18-to-49-year-old audience, which, like the total audience, ranked second among all series premieres on cable this year, topped only by “The Walking Dead,” the enormous hit on AMC.
FX pointed out that “Sons of Anarchy” had more viewers for its premiere than the huge HBO hit “Game of Thrones” — though, to be fair, HBO is available in far fewer homes than FX.
But another comparison was entirely fair. Last Tuesday, when “Sons of Anarchy” played on FX, it was the most-watched show of the night on any channel in the 18-to-49 group, topping CBS’s “Big Brother” by almost three million viewers.
Taking a page from AMC, which has turned its talk series, “Talking Dead” — about “The Walking Dead” — into a separate hit, FX also added a commentary show to follow “Sons of Anarchy” on Tuesdays. That show, “Anarchy Afterword,” attracted just under four million viewers.
“Sons of Anarchy” star and almost “Fifty Shades of Grey” star Charlie Hunnam has revealed that it was “a nervous breakdown” that really led to his departure from the upcoming adaptation of the best-selling E.L. James novel.
The actor, who would have played Christian Grey opposite Dakota Johnson’s Anastasia Steele, told Moviefone that the Focus Features drama would have been one project too many, since he already committed to shooting Guillermo del Toro‘s “Crimson Peak” during his hiatus from FX series “Sons.”
See video: ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Alternate Trailer: The Charlie Hunnam Cut
“I was going to finish ‘Sons’ at like 11 p.m. Friday night, get on the plane Saturday morning to Vancouver for ‘Fifty,’ missing the whole first week of rehearsal and start shooting Monday morning,” Hunnam explained. “And I was going to shoot that film, wrap that on the Wednesday and the following Monday I was going to start shooting ‘Crimson Peak’ in Toronto. I just had like … frankly, something of a nervous breakdown.”
The passionate response from fans and the attention the media was giving “Fifty Shades” also contributed to his decision to back out of the role just weeks after being cast.
“To fail on such a grand scale — because ‘Fifty’s going to be massive, it’s going to be huge. I really didn’t want to fail on such a grand scale and I just couldn’t transition from Jax Teller to Christian Grey in 48 hours,” Hunnam said. “I bit off more than I could chew and it was painful. I loved the character and I wanted to do it.”
Hunnam said in July that the experience was “pretty heartbreaking,” because he was genuinely excited to work with director Sam Taylor-Johnson, and reiterated the same disappointment about the “shit situation” in his latest commentary on his departure.
“I was really, really, sorry to do it,” Hunnam said. “It was one of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations.”
Source: thewrap.com
