Charlie Hunnam stopped by our press table to speak about the new season of Sons of Anarchy, Pacific Rim, and so much more. Last season was the most intense season and I can only imagine what we are going to be tortured with this season. It was so difficult watching Opie get slaughtered. It was an honor to get some character insight directly from the source. Charlie and the rest of the cast are some of the nicest people that you will ever meet. Don’t miss the season six premiere of Sons of Anarchy on September 10 on FX.
Pacific Rim:
Charlie Hunnam: I thought Guillermo killed it. I thought he did such a good job. It’s an original story and such a detailed original world that he created. Those characters had their parts. It’s a summer blockbuster but I thought it was really elevated stuff. Oh yeah, we suffered. He fucking tried to kill us. [Laughing.] Ron always gets away scot-free. You see that in the history of Sons of Anarchy, he’s only been in like one action sequence. He’s always like sitting back and smoking a cigar and doing fucking nothing, while we all kill ourselves.
Clay’s influence on Jax:
Charlie Hunnam: I think that to a certain degree it’s true that you learn the position from your predecessor. I think that much more importantly it’s just a universal problem that power corrupts. I think that Jax struggled with that, struggled with the way that all presidents do, of the club or the United States, of listening to all the people around them. You are supposed to be the representative of the masses whether it’s the people on the street or your brothers in a motorcycle club. When you have a lot of decisions to make and a lot at stake with all of those decisions, it’s very easy to just say well I know in my heart that this is the right thing to do so I’m not going to put it up for a vote. I also think that he inherited a total disaster from Clay, so there was a lot of stuff that he was embroiled in. Had he been making those decisions from the beginning they wouldn’t have been involved in the first place.
Hardest scene to finish and walk away from:
Charlie Hunnam: All of that stuff with Ryan Hurst as Opie. It was really brutal to play. I really had a hard time with that, much more than I even anticipated. This show has been such an amazing creative experience for me but that was definitely the deepest days of work I have ever had in my career. It was really difficult to say goodbye to him and kind of had a lasting effect through the course of the season, the anxiety and pain of that. There is a scene where Boone and I did – I haven’t seen the season yet and I don’t even know if it made the cut but I believe it did – there is a scene where we are in the chapel in the second to last episode where we have a massive argument about the direction of where we are going and there was a bunch of other stuff going on at work around that, there had been some contention and it just all exploded out in that scene in a way that neither of us had anticipated. I guess that was also a really big scene for me.
Jax’s confidant:
Charlie Hunnam: I think that you’ll see in this season that he really lacks that. He always has a strong conscience. He had his Jiminy Cricket but I think he struggles without it. I think, in the absence of Bobby Elvis and obviously Opie, in the early part of this season, you see him really struggle.
Guilt about Opie and Tara:
Charlie Hunnam: I think right now that guilt is being clouded by a sense of betrayal. I think if he was honest with himself he would understand where it was coming from and take some responsibility, but I think that the sense of betrayal is so great that it’s kind of clouding the clarity of that. I think that will probably come back and there will be like a reckoning for Jax, but right now I don’t think he’s at that place.
Kurt’s plan:
Charlie Hunnam: I want to find out as I get the scripts. Sometimes Kurt, in the past, has had an idea and that idea has evolved and changed and I’ve been kind of galloping towards a fundamental beat and it’s changed and I’ve had to recalibrate and it’s been difficult for me. More so, I’m just really engaged in the present of Jax’s journey. I don’t really want to know where he’s headed or how it’s all going to end for him.
Jax as the Shakespearean hero:
Charlie Hunnam: Yeah, I think so. I think there is definitely a tragic poetry to the guy, but I also really see him just as a very multidimensional real guy. He feels like a real guy to me who is just flawed and trying to do his best for his family and his brothers. You know, he just feels very close to me. To think about him in those terms is almost too abstract because to me he’s like a real guy that lives inside me.
Other projects:
Charlie Hunnam: I’ve got a couple of really great things going on. I’m going to go and do a movie with John Hillcoat who did The Road, The Proposition, and Lawless. I’m going to do the movie with Christoph Waltz and Cate Blanchett, which is super exciting. I’m going to do another movie with Guillermo – [Crimson Peak]. Then I’ve got the last season of the show and then I have a film that I just wrote that I’m going to try to put together and go and act in. It’s basically a story about the American dream and the failure of the American dream in society but the success in the individual who is willing to corrupt his conscience and his morality to get it. It’s basically about this true story from an article that I optioned from Rolling Stone magazine about this blonde-haired, blue-eyed, all-American kid who dreamt of leaving his poverty behind and he got a football scholarship and everything was going great and then he lost it all. He had nowhere to put all that discipline and ambition in hope for his future, so he became a drug dealer. He became probably the most successful drug dealer in the last decade.
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