Charlie Hunnam isn’t afraid to stand out. It’s what makes him successful
By: Anna Maltby; Photograph by: Bryce Duffy; Still-life photographs by: Jonathan Kantor
A quick tip if you ever want to hang with young outlaw bikers: Don’t wear leather boots. They’re cliche. They give you away as an outsider, a fake. Charlie Hunnam knows that. It’s why, when he plays a biker on FX’s Sons of Anarchy, he wears white sneakers. That’s the way many real guys roll.
“I’ve had people come up to me in the street wearing leather pants and leather boots, saying, ‘Love your show, man, but why do you wear those white sneaks? Bikers don’t wear white sneaks,’ ” Hunnam says. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m sure you wear leather boots when you’re on your bike, man—’cause you’re a dentist.’ ”
Hunnam should be one to talk. He’s a well-groomed Brit, an actor who drives a Cadillac and collects Nike Air Max 90s—hardly tough-guy material. Yet he doesn’t just play a biker on TV. He hangs with them—the real ones, who aren’t dentists. He even wears a gold-plated bullet around his neck in honor of a fellow rider who was gunned down. Hunnam is determined to belong in their world.
Bikers—gruff, independent, loyal to their lifestyle—fascinate Hunnam. He thinks of them as somewhat like his father, a rough guy who flirted with the wrong side of the law.
It’s partly why Hunnam took the job on Sons of Anarchy, and why he wanted to become close with the men he portrays. “It’s not that these guys want to be gangsters. They just don’t want to be told what to do,” he says. “They’re not succumbing to living life in a 9-to-5 way. That’s something I understand.”
Every man has an image of himself—an ideal, a lifestyle, a place he feels most right. Hunnam has traveled far to seize his. He’s taken risks, as any man should. One was leaving his hometown of New castle, in northern England, for Hollywood. Another was turning down a role in Forgetting Sarah Marshall even though one of its main characters, an ego maniac musician, was written with him in mind. The movie was going to be huge. Still, Hunnam knows he’s not a comedian, and he respects his limits.
This is the power of determination and having trust in yourself. If you believe you belong somewhere—in a manager’s office or in a certain social scene—then you go there, study it, and find a place in it.
It wasn’t easy for Hunnam to earn the bikers’ trust. You don’t approach a new group and act like you belong, just like you don’t walk into a new job and act like you can run the place. That’s disrespectful. Instead, Hunnam asked an acquaintance to introduce him to some bikers he knew. Then he sat back.
“It’s a question of knowing how to behave,” Hunnam says. “Be quiet until you have a really firm grasp on what’s going on, and then you can open up a little bit. We have two ears and one mouth because we’re supposed to use them in that ratio.”
Pay attention to details. That’s the key to learning new surroundings and winning skeptics over. It’s how Hunnam noticed those bikers’ white sneakers, and how he developed friendships with them. “Now I hang out with them for a few days whenever I start to feel like I’m wavering,” he says.
Below are other ways he crafts his identity.
