Charlie Hunnam reveals how he won over filmmaker Guy Ritchie to play King Arthur
CHARLIE Hunnam would have missed out on wearing King Arthur’s crown if he hadn’t succeeded in winning Guy Ritchie over at the last minute.
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NEVER let it be said that Charlie Hunnam didn’t earn King Arthur’s crown.
“It was certainly a physically challenging six months,” understates the actor, who was put through the wringer to portray Arthur’s rise from street-brawling pauper to rightful king in Guy Ritchie’s rollicking new take on the myth, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.
Hunnam’s hard work started even before cameras rolled — having to prove to Ritchie that he had the right royal stuff.
“When my name was thrown into the hat and (Ritchie) didn’t really respond, I just said, ‘Well, f--- that!’,” explains Hunnam, who was just wrapping his seven seasons on FX drama Sons of Anarchy when the Arthur role popped up. “I’m certainly not above going to auditions, so I said, ‘I’ll go to England’.
“I felt from the feedback we got that he didn’t have an accurate perception of who I was and what I was about, so more than anything I just wanted to go and right what I felt was a misconception. I still didn’t even think I’d get the role, because I figured Guy Ritchie knows what he wants.
“But I thought he was going to like me more than he thought he was going to, so ... I hadn’t been to England for a while, I thought I’d come see my mum and have a cup of tea with Guy and show him what I was about. Then we ended up really, really liking each other and he said, ‘All right then, you f---er, you can audition’.”
Hunnam may not be the classic geezer type Ritchie built a career out of celebrating in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatched, but he’s got Northern knockabout charm to spare, mixing eloquence and expletives in a manner that would make Ritchie proud — and which works perfectly for this Arthur.
After the king Uther Pendragon (Eric Bana) is betrayed and killed by his brother Vortigern (Jude Law), baby Arthur escapes and grows up a fighter and scammer on the streets of Londinium among prostitutes and criminals, with no idea of his birthright.
As years pass and Vertigorn’s paranoia about the legend the rightful heir will one day pull sword from stone grows, he rounds up all the young men of the land to attempt the feat.
“For people who know the Arthurian legend, it hits all of the milestones you would hope for,” says Hunnam. “But Guy’s sensibility generally as a filmmaker (means the film is) a lot grittier and cheekier than any of the adaptations we’ve ever seen before.
“Guy wanted to start Arthur as a loveable but nonetheless bad guy; more of an ignoble character than the noble character that you normally see Arthur portrayed as. I mean, we’ve all seen the version where the noble knight goes on the noble quest to become the noble king ... Guy’s genesis of this was well, what if this dude is a little bit more of a motherf---er?”
Hunnam laughs that he had no trouble finding his own inner so-and-so. He also copped a bit of style from trash-talking Irish MMA fighter Conor McGregor.
Hunnam’s initial pursuit of Arthur wasn’t completely about proving Ritchie wrong. The 37-year-old, who grew up in Newcastle and Cumbria in the UK, can trace his desire to act directly back to the 1981 Arthur film Excalibur, which starred the likes of Helen Mirren and Liam Neeson.
“Every Englishman has a certain connection to the King Arthur mythology,” he says. “I had a little bit of a love affair with John Boorman’s Excalibur when I was a kid — it was one of the films that really awakened my imagination to the idea of being an actor, just on a basic logistical level, trying to figure out what the process of filmmaking was. And realising that obviously not everyone knows how to ride horses and sword fight, so you’d be taught that (as) part of the process. As a six or seven-year-old kid, it seemed like a pretty good job to spend your time learning to sword fight, ride horses and kiss pretty girls.”
The Arthur archetype also played to his grown-up interests — things like “self-actualisation and overcoming one’s personal fears in order to manifest whatever personal destiny we feel compelled to follow”.
In the film, after the Londinium upstart has pulled Excalibur from the stone, Law’s villainous uncle asks Arthur, “What gave you such drive?”
It’s a question that would flummox many, but Hunnam responds immediately.
“I am pretty sure I know the answer to that question. I lived in Newcastle until I was 12 years old and had a very happy childhood there. I remember I left on Valentine’s Day of 1992, my first year at high school. I left that day getting 17 Valentine’s cards from 17 different girls ... and I say that to illustrate how popular I was; I was really one of the little dons of the school.
“Then I moved to the Lakes District and found myself not fitting in at all and having a really horrible time. It was a very rural place, so I had an enormous amount of time alone in the countryside. It created a level of unhappiness but also an amount of space for my imagination to cultivate a plan for what I wanted my life to look like once I was able to get the f--- out of there — which was all I was thinking about at that point.
“Had I had a happier time and been distracted with the normal things you engage in your teenage years — you know, chasing girls and going out boozing and all of that stuff — I don’t think I would have had such a clarity of what I wanted my life to be because I wouldn’t have been projecting into the future to make the present more tolerable as significantly as I was.
“And I wouldn’t have had the drive to get out of there as quickly as I did.”
Hunnam won his first major role in much-loved British dramedy Queer as Folk aged 18, before moving to the US where gigs in short-lived TV series Young Americans and Judd Apatow’s Undeclared then made way for the big screen: the title role in Nicholas Nickleby; the mad, violent young lieutenant who kills Jude Law’s character in Cold Mountain; the co-lead in cult soccer movie Green Street Hooligans with Elijah Wood; a youth joining the dystopian uprising in Children of Men.
In 2008 came the series that would make Hunnam’s name internationally: Sons of Anarchy, about a young man searching for his place in the California biker gang he was born into.
After the biggest, longest-running job he’d ever had ended, the chance to go home and make something as quintessentially British as King Arthur came as almost a relief.
“I felt locked in America for a long time. I mean, it is my choice, I was really excited to go to America. But right when I got Sons of Anarchy I was in a bit of a transition period where I’d been feeling the pull to spend a significantly larger amount of time in the UK,” he says. “Then I got Sons and was sort of married to America for the eight years that show ran.
“By the time that finished, I was actively seeking spending time in the UK again. I’d actually discussed with my girlfriend maybe renting a little flat in London and just seeing what life back here would feel like. Then I got Arthur and ... fate brought me back. It was really, really wonderful.”
The bonus was it allowed Hunnam to quickly let go of Jax, the Hamlet-like figure at the centre of Sons’ Shakespeare-on-two-wheels dramas. His girlfriend of more than a decade, jewellery designer Morgana McNelis, “was pretty excited to see the end of that period,” Hunnam admits with a laugh.
Hunnam will swap mythology for real-life mystery when The Lost City of Z, about a British explorer who disappeared in the Amazon in the 1920s, opens in August.
Where he’ll go from there remains a mystery, even to Hunnam.
He famously dropped out of playing Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey at the last minute and though many would argue he made the right choice, Hunnam called the experience professionally “heartbreaking” and “deeply unpleasant”.
Though he’s trying to get better at it, he still agonises over decision-making.
“I’m in a better position than I’ve ever been now and have much more choice and much more opportunity presented to me, and feel more neurotic than ever about the state of my career,” he laughs.
What he does know for sure is that acting feels like a “significant and valuable use” of his time — even if it doesn’t exactly line up with the vision he had as a child.
“It’s funny, the specific things that I was interested in as a kid — horse riding, sword fighting and kissing girls — are the least favourite parts of the job now. It’s no fun to be sword-fighting 12 hours a day, five days in a row and getting beat up. And I’m a total germophobe so I don’t really like kissing any girl apart from my girlfriend, because, you know, herpes is real!”
KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD OPENS TODAY
CHARLIE’S BANA DAY
Charlie Hunnam’s previous travels on screen meant he’d worked with both his King Arthur uncle and father previously.
Jude Law he calls “a formidable adversary” who “did a pretty extraordinary job” in Legend of the Sword. Hunnam and Eric Bana played “real enemies” in the 2012 film Deadfall, but the Aussie is “certainly a better father than adversary,” Hunnam laughs.
“Eric’s fantastic. I have been a huge fan of his from Chopper onwards.
“One of his very, very dear friends is also a good friend of mine — a guy called Kim Coates that I worked with on Sons of Anarchy for many years. So it always felt like there was sort of a family connection to Bana.”
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