Press/Interview: Charlie reflects on his most iconic role and the long road to Apple TV+ epic Shantaram

Press/Interview: Charlie reflects on his most iconic role and the long road to Apple TV+ epic Shantaram

RadioTimes.com — Nearly 25 years after his groundbreaking debut in Queer as Folk, Charlie Hunnam’s zeal for stories that seek to understand the human condition hasn’t wavered. He’s here to talk about his new series Shantaram, an Apple TV+ crime epic set in India, which the Sons of Anarchy star has long had his eyes on.

Based on a partly-fictional 936 page novel by Gregory David Roberts that spans continents, heroin addiction and arms smuggling for mujahideen freedom fighters, Shantaram has been a hot Hollywood property since its publication in 2003. Warner Bros splashed out $2m for the film rights, with Johnny Depp set to star as Lin, an Australian bank robber who breaks out of prison and flees to India. But that didn’t materialise, with Hunnam watching from the sidelines as others attempted to bring his dream project to life for two decades.

“It was always clear why this was an impossible task to adapt for film,” he says of the attempts to squeeze the expansive narrative into just two hours. But then streaming disrupted the film and TV industry as we once knew it, with enormous corporations such as Apple (who has funded the first season to the tune of $100m) wanting in on the entertainment boom.

Reflecting on the shifting industry economics that eventually made it possible to make Shantaram, Hunnam says: “It’s such an odyssey and in a film-centric world, I don’t think it was possible. By the time we nabbed the rights, we were in the golden age of television.”

Hunnam describes himself as an actor willing to give himself over entirely to his director and loves nothing more than immersing himself in the inner lives of his characters. “I was possessed by this material,” he says of Lin, who has seen hell but remains hopeful. Due to a COVID-enforced shutdown and a change in showrunner as a result of creative differences between Eric Singer and Apple, Hunnam was given the time and space to interrogate how he wanted to approach the character.

“I had this very powerful conviction that he needed to be a regular guy who had made a mistake that was going to dictate the next decade of his life,” he says. “In the beginning, I wanted him to be stripped down and naked. There were others who wanted to bring elements from later in the novel to earlier in the show, but I rejected that violently because it felt right to me to go on a journey.”

Hunnam remains committed to his vision for Lin but isn’t so sure it will work for everyone: “Whether or not my conviction was right, I don’t know. But it was right for me.” Continue reading Press/Interview: Charlie reflects on his most iconic role and the long road to Apple TV+ epic Shantaram

Photos: Shantaram 1×01-1×03 Screen Captures

Photos: Shantaram 1×01-1×03 Screen Captures

Unless you’ve been living under a rock until recently, Charlie’s newest series ‘Shantaram’ premiered on AppleTV+ this Friday with the first three episodes available to stream immediately. I’ve added over 1,500+ high quality screen captures of Charlie as Lin Ford from those episodes into the gallery for viewing.

You can watch ‘Shantaram’ which is now available on AppleTV+ for $4.99 a month or you can take advantage of their 7-Day free trial!



Press/Interview: Charlie Hunnam wanted to produce ‘Shantaram’ more than he wanted to star in it

Press/Interview: Charlie Hunnam wanted to produce ‘Shantaram’ more than he wanted to star in it

“I didn’t feel necessarily as though this is my role and I’m the only one who can play it, by any means.”

EW.com — Years ago while on vacation in Thailand, Charlie Hunnam read Shantaram, the 2003 international best-selling novel from Australian author Gregory David Roberts. And ever since he finished it, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He had “devoured” the 900 page book and couldn’t put it down — much to the detriment of the partner he was on vacation with — and knew it deserved to be brought to life onscreen. He felt passionately about producing a TV adaptation of it, but he ultimately had to wait a long time until the rights became available (a film version of Shantaram had been in the works for years from producer Johnny Depp).

“A couple of years later, they admitted defeat with that process — I think because of the length and complexity of the story, it’s really impossible to distill it down to two hours,” Hunnam tells EW. “After many, many noble attempts, Warner Brothers threw in the hat and the rights became available again, so the dream became alive again and here we are.”

Shantaram tells the story of fugitive Lin Ford’s (Hunnam) adventures in 1980s Bombay after escaping prison. Alone in an unfamiliar city, he falls for an enigmatic and intriguing woman while on the run from his past, and soon must choose between freedom or love, and the complications that come with it. Hunnam fell in love with the “magnificently written text” but admits that he didn’t expect — or even want — to play the lead role in the AppleTV+ series, preferring to stay behind the camera in a producer role until he ultimately decided to portray Lin later in the development process.

“I have a very not fully formed but kind of a philosophical view of these things, that ultimately stories want to get told, and they can get told at different times with different people,” Hunnam says. “I didn’t feel necessarily as though this is my role and I’m the only one who can play it, by any means. It’s an amazing role and an amazing story, and there were a lot of people that would have done a splendid job, but I felt very grateful and fortunate that I got to bring it to life.”

The first three episodes of Shantaram premiere Oct. 14 on Apple TV+ before moving to a weekly release through Dec. 16.