In his Levi's chambray shirt and jeans, long blonde hair and barely tamed beard, you'd be hard pressed to distinguish Charlie Hunnam from his hard-as-nails biker Jax Teller on Sons Of Anarchy. That is until he opens his mouth and the accent hits you, a jumbled blend of Californian and British that belies a childhood spent on the estates of Newcastle and the hills of the Lake District. "I was just up in Newcastle for a month and I'd get into conversations with people," smiles Hunnam. "English people are always surprised I'm English."
After making his mark in Nineties Channel 4 drama Queer As Folk, Hunnam moved to LA and landed the lead role in Kurt Sutter's dark gang-based drama (if you haven't seen it, think
The Sopranos on Harleys) which has recently finished its fifth season. Now he's hitting the big screen in a big way, with the lead role in Guillermo Del Toro's giant robots-vs-monsters epic
Pacific Rim. Ahead of the film's release, we sat down with Hunnam in London to talk fisticuffs, his biker fan-base and his surprisingly large trainer collection...
**GQ: How was shooting your GQ Style cover with Terry Richardson?
** Charlie Hunnam: Doing the shoot was fun - it was pretty quick, but we had a good time. But doing the article but I had a really long and interesting conversation with the journalist [Paul Flynn]. I really enjoyed talking to him. To be on the cover of a magazine like GQ is always very exciting. I obviously grew up reading GQ and loved the magazine, so when they asked me to be in it and I later found out it was the cover, that was exciting.
**What was it like working with Idris Elba on Pacific Rim? You're both Brits who are known for big American TV shows.
** Stringer Bell vs Jax Teller! It was exciting. I must confess, I circled around The Wire for a long time but I've never really seen it. I have the whole thing on DVD, but I've just been waiting for a period of time where I can sit down and commit 60 hours to watch it. So I came in knowing who Idris was but not being that familiar with his work. He was a very formidable presence on the set and to go up against. We have a slightly contentious relationship in the movie, and tried out different versions of that, from the very contentious to us just being mildly irritated by each other. He likes to experiment with those dynamics off set a little bit, and to begin with I didn't fully understand what he was doing. I just felt this overwhelming desire to punch him in the face! [Laughs] I thought, "well, I can just use it in the work." But as I got to know him better, I saw he's actually a great guy - and he was just working out the dynamic for himself.
**How did the film come about? At one point you were going to appear in Hell Boy 2, then it never happened.
** I'd met with Guillermo for Hell Boy 2, and spent some time with him, done a prosthetics test, and then an audition.
He decided I wasn't quite right for that role [of lead villain Prince Nuada] but he expressed an interest with working with me at some point in the future. So I went about my way, hoping that would come about. Guillermo would give Ron [Perlman] - who has a longstanding collaboration with Guillermo - the odd message to send me when he was watching Sons Of Anarchy saying "I think you're doing great work." Then when Guillermo was going to make
The Hobbit, I heard on the grapevine that he was going to offer me a role in that.Then whatever happened with The Hobbit happened, and he wasn't directing it any more. So I was like, "Oh, goddamn it!" I didn't know anything about
Pacific Rim at all, when he just gave me a call and told me to come up to his office and talk about it. We talked for about an hour and a half about this world he wanted to create and the whole concept of it, but much more importantly about the human story at the centre of it.
**It's great to see a genuinely original sci-fi franchise.
** Absolutely. This landscape is just dominated by remakes and sequels and adaptations - and sequel-remakes of adaptations.
It's great and this world is so wildly original. I feel like there's nobody better than Guillermo to bring it to life, because he just lives and breathes the stuff.
**You're in amazing shape in this film. What's your training regime like? We read that you spent some time training at the Shaolin Temple...
** I was going to go and do a month in Wing Chun kung fu in the Shaolin Temple in China and then I got a movie and couldn't go because of it. But I still actually intend to do that, although I'm not sure if I'm going to go to China; I might actually go to Thailand and do a month-long intensive Muay Thai academy. I was shooting Sons Of Anarchy until two weeks before we started shooting Pacific Rim, and Guillermo said [puts on Mexican accent] "My friend, I need you to show up looking like a man capable of saving the world!" I thought, "Aw, f***" because you know, f***ing Brad Pitt ruined it for everyone. After Fight Club, the expectation of what a dude is supposed to look like when he takes is shirt off is just so high. So I said "I'll try and make it happen." So I shot 14-15 hours a day on Sons, then I would go the gym for two and half hours every day after work.
You know what? Being an actor is fantastic because you get to live your dreams and all of that, but I always think it's slightly irritating when you hear from the outside world and people are like, "Yeah, well if I was an actor and all I had to do was look good, I could be that ripped too." Well I've got news for you, man!
I work 15 hours a day and still go to the gym. Most people work eight hours a day and say "I haven't got time to work out."
Bulls***! If you want to be super-fit and look ripped then you find the time no matter what.
**You seem like you can handle yourself. I read that you once fought off an intruder who broke into your house?
** I grew up playing rugby, rough-and-tumble, in a tough neighbourhood where I had to fight. It wasn't even so much Newcastle; I went to the Lake District and there was a very... regional, small town type of mentality up there, where fighting was a real currency and the hard guys were the celebrities of that town. So I ended up fighting a little bit growing up. I always think that the ability to fight and defend oneself is a skill that every man should have but endeavour never to use, you know? I would never willingly look to get into a physical altercation, but yeah - you break into my house at 3 o'clock in the morning, and I am going to whoop your f***ing ass!
What's the strangest thing you've been given by a fan?
I've been given a lot of knives. That's a big thing in the biker culture, particularly in California, because as long as it's not concealed, you're allowed to carry a knife I think it's a knife with a no longer than six inch blade. Still, six inches is a pretty big knife! We've also become, I'm told, a really big favourite in the armed forces, and again, within the military giving each other knives is a big cultural thing. In the show I carry a Ka-Bar, which is the US Marine Corps' standard issue knife. So now I have dozens of Ka-Bars that military guys have given me and I've been told that a couple of them "have been used". Which is a little bit... grimy, you know? I'm not sure about the energy of that...
**In Sons you rarely take off the SAMCRO jacket, but in real life you collect Nike Air Max 90 trainers?
** Yeah! I remember in 1990, when I was 10 years old, the Air Max 90s got released in the infrared colourway, that orange with the grey canvas and the white mesh on the front. But they were £100 for a pair of those sneakers and I was pretty poor, so we weren't spending that much money on sneakers in my household. But I just absolutely loved them. So I got a little bit older and I think it was 2005 that they re-issued the infra-red colourway, which led to this insurgence of interest in the 90s. At that point, I could afford them. I don't know how it happened, but I became obsessed with buying every colourway I could get my hands on. I was a super dork. You can collect sneakers and still be pretty cool - sneakers are cool - but if you never wear them and keep them box fresh? Then you're just a dork. That's what I was: I never wore them. But I never felt indulgent buying them all because I didn't wear them. I thought they would at least retain their value, if not go up in value.
**Then they do reissues...
** Right, then they do reissues and they don't have any value! I'm actually scaling back the collection. I went through them and said "this is ridiculous." So I gave some pairs to charity, and just kept the pairs I absolutely couldn't part with.
So I've scaled it down to probably... 45 pairs now.
**You're currently filming the sixth series of Sons Of Anarchy?
** We're currently filming season six of Sons.
Historically the American contracts are seven years, and so the guys and I are all signed up for seven years. But it's been a wonderful creative experience for me, so I always said to [series creator] Kurt [Sutter] that if he needed time to like see this through to its natural conclusion, then I'd more than happily give him the extra time.
You're also writing a script based on American drug lord Edgar Valdez.
Yes, I'm writing. I wrote a script about Vlad The Impaler that I developed with Plan B, Brad Pitt's company. We did that but never quite got the momentum that we needed, so that's sitting on the shelf right now. Hopefully at some point we'll be able to dust it off and get it made. But yeah, now I've got this other thing based on a Rolling Stone article that I optioned. It's about this blonde-haired, blue-eyed all-American kid who had great aspirations for his life, and lost it all in one fell swoop when he got into an accident. The accident was deemed his fault and he lost his football scholarship and with it everything that was associated with that - the chance of escaping poverty. So he became very disenchanted with the whole American dream and said "f*** it, I'm going to start dealing drugs." Cut to five years later, he's running one of the biggest cartels in Mexico. It's an exploration of the death of the American dream. That's what I'm interested in.
What can you tell us about filming Crimson Peak with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jessica Chastain?
I'm doing another movie with Guillermo, which is a very different movie. It's a little Jane Austen type love story with a supernatural element to it. I was really flattered and happy when I got the call right after finishing Pacific Rim. So we're going to do that, which is really exciting because I've always dreamt of those kind of collaborations between directors and actors. I always felt very envious of that... and now I appear to be embarking on one.
Pacific Rim is out on 12 July. See exclusive bonus content from Guillermo Del Toro at pacificrimmovie-vault.com/uk.
