'Sons of Anarchy': Charlie Hunnam Pics

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As Sons of Anarchy's fifth season comes nears its finale, star Charlie Hunnam teases the bumpy road ahead: ''This year we pretty much really neatly wrap everything up and we think, 'Oh, it's going to end on a high note,' and then I get sucker punched with this problem in the last seconds of the season.''

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''For all its wonderful aspects, the dynamics we have on Sons of Anarchy are not actually true,'' admits Hunnam, '''cause you can't act like those guys act and stay out of prison anymore.''

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Hunnam acknowledges he had one difficulty in creating the character of Jax Teller: ''I was very aware and very unhappy with my work in the first two seasons...because all I was thinking about was the American accent. It contained me in a way that I wasn't free to be the character. When you're, like, laboring over an accent that's so different from your own, it becomes a lot of— it became a lot of my focus. And I look back at those episodes now and kind of cringe.''

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Makeup artist Michelle Garbin explains another challenge of the show: ''On a busy day we will do 100 tattoos. They are transfers. We regularly do Charlie, Ron [Perlman], Katey [Sagal], Kim [Coates], Theo [Rossi], and Ryan [Hurst] — until this year, and he had the most tattoos. We would also have to cover his tattoos, and apply some on top of his. Ryan would take about an hour and a half.''

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''The majority of the time we use tattoo transfers,'' explains Garbin. ''However, there has been a lot of times we've been on location in the middle of nowhere when we were actually hand drawing them in because they have a tendency to fall off, melt off or rub off.''

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But Hunnam doesn't think it's only the tattoos and machismo that draw women to the show. ''It's not just about the feeling of a man who's going to fight for them and protect them and be like an old-school type of good guy,'' he says. ''They like seeing Gemma and Tara going, 'You know what? F--- it, I'm not gonna be downtrodden, I'm not gonna be battered by the man.' Like every man, every woman in America at one point or another wants to punch her boss in the face. There are very few outlets for women to fulfill that fantasy.''

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Of Sons' complex matriarch Gemma (Sagal), Hunnam notes, ''There's a part of Jax that I think will always adore his mom and do what he needs to do to protect her. I think he's always been frustrated by how overbearing she is, and there's parts of him that feel she has no place having any say in this club. That's part of why she was so attracted to Clay because Clay was going to open the door and make her essentially a member.''

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And as for Jax's father figure/nemesis Clay, played by Perlman, Hunnam says, ''I think that Ron to begin with is right on the money.'' He adds about the rest of SAMCRO, ''I think Kurt [Sutter, Sons' creator] did a phenomenal job assembling a group of kind of like-minded guys, who look at each other sitting around that table and believe in each other.''

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Looking to the series' future, Hunnam says, ''I want to tell the story until we feel like we've reached the natural conclusion. And I think that as the storyteller, Kurt, has had to plan that natural conclusion, so if he wraps it up in a way that feels organic, then I'd be fine with it. If, at seven years, we feel like we need 10 more episodes or we need eight more episodes to complete the story, then I just want to see it through to the end, no matter what that is.''

For more from EW's exclusive Sons of Anarchy cover story, buy it here now or from your local magazine seller.