Charlie Hunnam: The Queer As Folk star has grown into a burly biker with a top-rated cable show
Charlie Hunnam knew what he was letting himself in for. It was all there in the script. Within minutes of appearing on a TV screen in his first major role, playing a 15-year-old schoolboy, he’d be having his naked bum licked by a drug-taking club Lothario. “I was just thrown into this world and it was all so exciting, and I didn’t really have any gauge of what was a normal day on a set and what wasn’t,” the actor says of his appearance in Channel 4′s headline-rattling 1999 drama Queer as Folk. “But I was a pretty fearless kid. I was just amazed that I’d been given this opportunity. I jumped in head first.”
Did getting his kit off, sticking his legs behind his ears and pretending to prematurely ejaculate on another actor’s chest come easily? “I wouldn’t say it came easily,” laughs Hunnam, who turned 30 this month. “But easier than it would now!”
Newcastle-born Hunnam was 18 when Russell T Davies – more recently Doctor Who’s reboot Svengali – cast him as young Nathan in the writer/creator’s ground-breaking series set amid Manchester’s vibrant gay community. The voiceover at the beginning of the first episode described Hunnam’s character as “the one-night stand that never went away”. Beautiful, blond, inexperienced Nathan was the youngster who bewitched sharp-suited gadabout Stuart (played by Aidan Gillen) and nice, soppy Doctor Who fan and narrator Vince (Craig Kelly).
Off-screen, too, Hunnam was causing a fuss. As the show’s critical applause – and the controversy over its near-the-knuckle depictions of gay sex – reverberated, the teenage newcomer received many a tempting offer. Queer as Folk was recommissioned for two specials. Hunnam was invited to Hollywood to meet managers and agents. And Madonna asked him over for dinner. Come again?
“She told me not to tell the cab driver whose house I was going to,” he remembers of the ride to the star’s Beverly Hills home. Hunnam was so paranoid that he exited the taxi at the bottom of her street – not realising it was “a mile long”. He arrived late, sweaty and clutching his dinner gift: a Wonder Woman Pez dispenser. (“Well, what wine would you take to Madonna for dinner?”) Inside, a crew of dinner guests were waiting for the teenage Geordie, including Sandra Bernhard and the actress Debbie Mazar (“Debbie Mazar! From Goodfellas!”). Someone asked him why he was in town. “For a job,” he replied. “A blow job?” Madonna asked, to much laughter. Hunnam groaned. It was going to be that kind of dinner. Fame had come walloping into his life, and he wasn’t sure he liked it.
Charlie Hunnam didn’t know what he was letting himself in for. He signed on for the lead role in Sons of Anarchy, a new American TV drama about biker gangs in northern California, knowing that the material was lyrical, intense and violent. Certainly he understood that, to play a gun-running gang’s violent-but-idealistic vice-president Jax, he would have to research the codes and nefarious activities of the Hells Angels and their outlaw associates. He’d need to learn how to ride a Harley-Davidson, get (fake) tattoos, grow his hair and stubble, and put in serious gym time. He knew that American cable network FX – the “edgy” outpost of the Fox empire – was right behind the show, which was created by Kurt Sutter, previously an executive producer on dark, tough cop show The Shield. But he didn’t grasp how successful it would be, nor how far it might take him.
Critically acclaimed, in its second season – which starts here on Bravo on Wednesday – Sons of Anarchy was the highest-rated cable show on American TV last year. Season three begins shooting in Los Angeles next week.
Source and to read full article go to: The Independent.