I’ve added captures of Charlie from the special features included on the official DVD of Crimson Peak. You can check those out in the gallery now.
Crimson Peak (2015) > DVD Extras > A Primer on Gothic Romance
Crimson Peak (2015) > DVD Extras > The Light and Dark of Crimson Peak
Crimson Peak (2015) > DVD Extras > Deleted Scene: “The Park”
I’ve added HD captures of Charlie as Dr. Alan McMichael in Crimson Peak which is officially available on DVD and Blu-ray on February 9th, 2016. You can pre-order your copy now on Amazon.com
Crimson Peak (2015) > Movie Captures
Check out a new still of Charlie as Dr. Alan McMichael from Crimson Peak which hits theaters as of October 16th!
Question: We were in the trailer with Jessica [Chastain] and she shared a little bit of her character’s biography with us, the non-spoiler stuff. Guillermo [Del Toro] mentioned that you had worked on your biography personally and I was wondering if you could share some things from your character’s bio with us as well.
CHARLIE HUNNAM: I don’t know what would be particularly interesting. The kind of first step for me of exploring who a character is to just go back in a fun way to get to know a character is to go and imagine his past and I did that in conjunction with doing a lot of reading about the time period and some research as to who was a significant voice of that time. It’s pretty benign stuff just really exploring his childhood and I thought a lot about the relationship that he and Edith had had, and thought back to some similar relationships that I had had and my life with people and like that and inform how I imagined how their relationship had evolved because it’s one of those things that deserves a real closeness between these characters at the beginning of the film, but the nature of their history isn’t really explored. I felt like I needed to know that for myself, and you know I went back and decided which authors that he would’ve been interested in and through those conversations, some of it actually made it to the script. Guillermo and I discussed a lot of his fascination with [Arthur] Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes and I felt like the way I saw him, I felt that [Henry David] Thoreau was probably somebody he would’ve been really interested in so I went back and read Walden again, so just fun stuff. Nothing really particularly exciting, just general exploration of a character’s history.
Jessica said that she learned to play the piano for this, and in fact she played piano for us.
HUNNAM: Did she? What a show-off.
[Laughs] Did you bring a piano with you?
HUNNAM: I did not bring a piano with me [laughs].
Did you add any strings to your bow this time, anything you didn’t know how to do before you started this movie?
HUNNAM: Not really. I reminded myself how to shave. I explored a little bit of the opthamalogical sciences. I am a doctor who studies in ophthalmology, so I kind of explored the nature of that and I was really more interested in why he would’ve chosen that as a profession. So Guillermo and I discussed a little bit of that and the idea of the eyes being the windows to the soul and in particular that was one of the things that kind of grew out of the bio that I had written for myself that I wanted to be a community man of science rather than in research because Guillermo and I discussed a lot my notion of who my father was in this world and that he was kind of a taciturn removed man who was research orientated and saw that that had not brought him a lot of happiness being removed. I thought that was something very important to me was that he was a guy that was really engaged in helping people and directly involved in the community and working with people and to help them as much as possible. And of course it’s a very exciting time to be in the 1900s for medical innovation and I think he was part of that explosion of ideas.
Guillermo said that he offered you a role during Pacific Rim. He said you were the first person here. When was making Pacific Rim with you he said that as far as he was concerned you were going to work on every single one of his movies moving forward.
HUNNAM: Yeah, that’s what he told me. It’s very exciting.
What was it that clicked? What is it that really works with the two of you?
HUNNAM: I don’t know, it’s always difficult to really sum up exactly why a relationship works, but we just like each other and respect each other and we have a lot of fun and make each other laugh and there’s just an ease about our process. I think we just trust each other and feel really comfortable. And I do as I’m told [laughs], I try not to cause him any problems and just help as much as I can and be available. I don’t know, it was a really beautiful thing and such a huge compliment to be invited back to the party, and he said that to me at the end of Pacific Rim. He just took me aside and said that the experience of working with me had been one of the fondest he’d had with working with an actor and that he hoped that we would continue this collaboration and that he was going to put me in all of his English films and that if I wanted to learn Spanish, I could be in the Spanish ones too. And it was just a lovely compliment, and true to his words is when he decided he was going to make this, he called me up and he said ‘let’s do it’.
Just to follow up, is there like a shorthand you have? Because he said that for everybody else he had written their bio, you were the only one who could come with your own bio, so is there sort of a shorthand to the relationship and the way that you guys work that you’ve crafted?
HUNNAM: I suppose so, but I think that the reason he didn’t write my bio was through the development of the script and things would come and go, with every draft I would write him an email, pal to pal, just a little bit of a commentary, and why I thought things. We had been kind of on the same page, and he had been intuiting my line of thought, and I had been probably more accurately intuiting his line of thought with changes that he’d made and then also things that had gone on that I had really missed and explained why. We started discussing this bio that I had written for myself which was always just been part of my process. I’m sure not every actor does that but I’ve always just found that it was very helpful to me. So I think he just thought it wasn’t necessary to write a bio for me because I had already written my own.
How far back does that date in your process?
HUNNAM: I think the first time I had done that was probably for Green Street Hooligans, so for the last eight or nine projects I’ve done.
Was it something that you had seen other people do and you thought that was a good way in, or was it something else?
HUNNAM: No, it was something I had developed through writing screenplays. That I needed to know these characters very well to be able to write them naturally. It was kind of an obvious thing to then apply to acting once I’d started doing that.
Check out the first character poster for Crimson Peak which hits theaters this October!
Check out the high quality scans in the gallery now.
Magazines / Publications > Total Film (Summer 2015)
You can check out Tom’s entire interview over at Collider.com
When Benedict Cumberbatch dropped out, Guillermo sent the script to you and he said that you turned around almost immediately and accepted, I think he said within 72 hours.
HIDDLESTON: Yeah.Was it based on him, or was it based on the script, or was it based on – What was it that made you say, ‘This is definitely a part worth taking’?
HIDDLESTON: Well, it happened very quickly. He called me, my agents called and said, ‘Guillermo Del Toro is going to call you in the next hour’ and he called me and told me the story and he said, ‘Don’t say yes, or no. But I’m gonna rewrite the script this weekend or tonight or tomorrow, and I’m gonna send you a new draft’ and like an hour later Jessica [Chastain] called me and said, ‘You have to do it’ [Laughs] ‘I want you to do it, and Guillermo wants you to do it’ and I was really excited I couldn’t wait to read the script. Then, it must have been like a day later, I got it and I read it immediately in one sitting and he had rewritten the role, so I got sort of my own draft, he had rewritten the part for me in a way. It’s just brilliant, it just is a brilliant screenplay, and I wanted to work with him, I knew that Jessica, and Mia [Wasikowska], and Charlie [Hunnam] were locked in and on board; and I love Mia and I know Jessica from before and I wanted to work with Charlie so there was just no possible way I was going to say ‘no’. Working with Guillermo who I’ve admired for so long, and the script itself was just brilliant, the screenplay was captivating and rich and sophisticated and terrifying; and the role was amazing, and different than anything else I’d done, It was a very, very quick ‘yes’ after that.Guillermo showed us some stills from the film and we saw the color scheme that Mario Bava, Hammer Films, bright Technicolor color scheme. Does that sort of aesthetic play into the performance as well, is there some level of bigness to it or are you guys playing smaller in that brighter, colorful space?
HIDDLESTON: Yeah, I didn’t think about the color too much in my approach, even though Kate Hawley’s sort of mood boards, the costume designer, she put together these extraordinary mood boards which covered her entire office with different headlines so it would be these massive posters of imitism, for Sharpe it might be Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, or depictions of Byron, or old kind of early, early prints of these long-haired Victorian engineers standing on hill tops, which seem like a cliché but it’s true. And then stuff about the mines, so all these pictures of boys who’d just crawled out the mines or people being washed after they’ve been down the mines for weeks; all those mood boards are plastered around the side of my trailer because the images themselves are so inspiring. Just the way people look, the way people dress, the way people carry themselves, the way people sat and stood, faces and haircuts. I did a lot of that just thinking about the visual sort of thing, but not necessarily color even though I knew that there’s this very dark midnight blue or something that we always have for the Sharpes, that Lucille and Thomas should have black hair.
We wanted Thomas to look like this Byronic hero, to be the tall, dark stranger in the new world, Charlie Hunnam is blonde and Mia is blonde and these two dark strangers from the north of England come along and they’re sophisticated and old and European and they should bring with them the era of gothic romance. I read some stuff, Guillermo pointed me towards The Mysteries of Udolpho which is this sort of early gothic romantic classic by Ann Radcliff, and The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, we talked about Rochester in Jane Eyre, even Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice; these figures, these wealthy gentlemen with big houses who possibly become emblems of English privilege that everyone’s talking about. Who is that man in the corner with the dark hair and the intense stare? The interest of that mystery, that there are gentlemen with dark secrets was something that was very compelling at the time.
Check out the first official still of Charlie as Dr. Alan McMichael in the upcoming horror film from Guillermo del Toro. Crimson Peak hits theaters October 16th!
In case you missed it, you can watch the recently released international trailer here!
