Charlie Hunnam

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Charlie Hunnam reveals why his new film - Lost Cities of Z - is a love letter to his girlfriend
The actor even cut himself off from the world - including his girlfriend of 12 years Morgana McNeils for five fonths while filming the hotly anticipated blockbuster

Hunky actor Charlie Hunnam was determined to lose himself in his role as an intrepid explorer searching for a lost ancient city in the Amazon jungle.

And the star ended up going through almost exactly what his real-life character Colonel Percival Fawcett did on his epic quest way back in the early 1900s.

He cut himself off from the world – including the woman he loved.

New Hollywood sensation Charlie had no contact with girlfriend of 12 years Morgana McNelis for five months while making hotly tipped blockbuster The Lost City of Z.

And like Colonel Fawcett’s real wife Nina, the jewellery designer wasn’t very happy.

But today the Geordie pin-up reveals he dedicated the whole movie as a “love letter” to Morgana, 33 – and an apology.

Charlie, 37, says: “We went to Colombia and the mail system doesn’t really work very well. It’s completely unreliable.

"I received a letter from her and I realised from the tone of it and things she was saying that she hadn’t received the two letters I sent before.

“I then just stopped writing to her altogether which obviously makes me sound like a total bastard. Appropriately so, but I was very apologetic.

“I bought her an emerald when I returned home from Columbia, because it’s the place of emeralds.

“But I think she was offended I brought that up because it felt reductive to her of that real sacrifice she had made for this, which was enormous.”

But any lingering frostiness there may have been between them over his lack of letters home ended when he took her to see the movie.

“I almost hate going to see films I’ve been in for the first time,” says Charlie.

“But this was a different experience. I took my girlfriend with me, and she watched it and recognised that it was both an apology, a recognition and a love letter to her. We were making it for our loved ones.”

The film, which co-stars Robert Pattinson and Sienna Miller as Fawcett’s wife Nina, is expected to be one of the year’s huge hits as it tells an already fascinating real life story.

Born in Devon in 1867, Col Fawcett joined the army at 18 and went on his first mission with the Royal Geographical Society to South America in 1906, to map the uncharted border between Bolivia and Brazil.

On the adventure he found evidence of what he thought was a lost city of tremendous riches.

He returned to the Mato Grosso region of Brazil time and again before the First World War in which he was gassed in the Belgian trenches.

Once he claimed he encountered a 62ft anaconda. His quest had become legendary, and was even said to inspire friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book The Lost World, as well as Indiana Jones.

In 1925, by then 57, he went on one last trip to South America, taking his 21-year-old son Jack.

The pair disappeared – never to be seen again. More than 100 men sent on various missions to look for him also went missing.

Charlie has his own ideas on the mystery.

He says: “Things he had with him, like his compass and ring, showed up in pawn shops later on. So I believe bandits followed him into the jungle and killed him for his equipment.”

Charlie’s five months in South America may have been nothing like as dangerous – but he lost a lot of weight to look right for the role.

“I do play a lot of physically formidable characters, but in reality I’m a small guy,” says 5ft 10in Charlie.

“I recently bulked up to 190lbs [13st 8lb] which is the biggest I have ever been. But it’s all gone.”

He laughs off descriptions of himself as the latest screen sex symbol.

“You get this reputation for being a certain thing but it’s not like I ever set out to be that,” he says. “I just think it’s funny.”

But Charlie, briefly married to actress Katharine Towne in the early Noughties, isn’t shy about flashing the flesh.

The son of a scrap merchant, whose first small role was in Newcastle children’s series Byker Grove, stripped off in Channel 4’s groundbreaking Queer As Folk at 18 in the Nineties.

He moved to LA and went on to win a legion of fans in Sky’s biker gang series Sons of Anarchy, also landing roles in TV series Young Americans, 2003’s Cold Mountain alongside Renee Zellweger and science fiction movie Pacific Rim.

A bookcase of Emmys later and Charlie was so in demand he pulled out of Fifty Shades Of Grey in 2015 – handing the keys for the Red Room of Pain to Jamie Dornan instead.

It was really down to having an embarrassment of riches,” admits Charlie. “I was doing Sons of Anarchy which ended up having an extra episode, pushing everything back a couple of weeks.

He was also already signed up to do gothic romance Crimson Peak. “Everything got compressed to the point where I had to make a difficult decision,” he says.

His next big role is in Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword, due out in May, which co-stars David Beckham.

As Guy’s pal, the ex-England ace was brought in for a cameo.

Charlie, who played a football hooligan in 2005 movie Green Street with Elijah Wood, says: “Beckham is awesome. I’m not a football fan, but he was great to work with.”

After losing weight for Lost City of Z, playing Arthur saw him put on nearly a stone of muscle – mostly through fight training which came with its share of bruises.

There was one very long sequence where we’re getting chased, smashed and falling off of buildings with swords,” he says.

“People are getting mauled and punched in the face and I actually split my eyebrow open.

“But I was fine with it. Anything that reduces the necessity to act is one less thing to worry about.”

Charlie’s next real-life role, however, will be as a doting boyfriend. “I was working on Sons of Anarchy for seven of the last nine years and between every season I’d do a film. I was working 100 hours a week, 51 weeks a year for eight years straight.

“So if Morgana and I are going to start talking about children and getting married, I’m going to have to figure out a way to balance that a little bit more effectively.”

“It was tough but in the end I would rather do a really good job on one film than two average jobs through trying to do two things at once.”

 

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Charlie Hunnam Talks Staying Buff While Wielding a Sword in Upcoming King Arthur Movie

It turns out that portraying a buff biker isn’t the only role that’s gotten Charlie Hunnam into great shape.

The Sons of Anarchy alum says he never realized how fit he’d become playing another character — King Arthur — but the actor tells PEOPLE his role in the upcoming King Arthur: Legend of the Sword got him in elite physical shape.

There was just an enormous amount of fighting. Some of the sequences would take five or six days to shoot, so every day, 14 hours a day fighting,” Hunnam, 36, said while attending CinemaCon on Wednesday. “The fitness level that I achieved during the course of that, I almost felt like I was a professional athlete, on that level.”

The actor said he weighed 180 pounds during filming, but he had to continue going to the gym after clocking in a day on the set in order to keep his muscle, since the sword fighting was very cardio intensive.
Hunnam said he had to learn not only his sword fighting sequences, but also those of the other actors because everything was filmed separately to allow the filmmakers to play with the swordplay speeds.

“I’d had to put an enormous amount of force into it and then an equal amount of force to stop it, to play as though there was resistance when there was none, which was incredibly physically demanding to keep doing that over and over and over and over for 12 hours a day,” he said.

Although he might have wanted to hit the spa after his long days of filming, Hunnam instead opted for the gym.

“I had to keep training,” he said. “I’d go the gym after work no matter what, so it wasn’t an enormous amount of salt baths or anything going on.”

 

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Charlie Hunnam Had A Quicky Marriage In Vegas At 18: ‘I Got The Cats At The End’

Charlie Hunnam was at CinemaCon to debut new footage from his long-awaited “King Arthur” film, directed by Guy Ritchie, but it’s the actor’s ‘first time in Vegas’ tale that has everyone talking.

The actor recalled his “terrible, painful” marriage to Katharine Towne, whom he knew for less than a month after meeting at a “Dawson’s Creek” audition.

“We had fallen madly in love and it was the first time I had ever been in love,” Hunnam recalls. “I had to leave to go back to England, and we thought, ‘What if we never see each other again?”

Obviously the answer was marriage, so the pair eloped in Vegas.

“We came to Vegas, but I couldn’t even get a drink so I didn’t think I was going to actually be able to get married,” the former “Sons of Anarchy” star remembers. In Vegas, however, where there’s a will (or an Elvis-themed wedding chapel) there’s a way.

“At 2 o’clock in the morning, we ended up getting married,” the 36-year-old says. “So that was that.”

Now the saying usually goes, What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Vegas but in Charlie’s case, his time in Vegas led to “three terrible years. Three terrible, painful, expensive years.”

The silver lining? “I got the cats at the end of it, so that was good. There was a small victory.”

When he wasn’t spilling about his quickie marriage, Hunnam was sharing how social media ruined David Beckham’s brilliant surprise celebrity cameo in the film! Watch below.

 

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Yum and Yum. Deliciousness overload!!!

 

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Having lunch with his SOA costars.

 

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At the LA premiere of Lost City of Z

 

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Mr Charlie Hunnam’s Life After Motorbikes
The Sons Of Anarchy star talks health fads, hiking and his crush on Mr David Beckham

Saturday morning at Claridge’s and it’s kedgeree o’clock. Mr Charlie Hunnam ambles in for our breakfast appointment in a private room at the back of the restaurant. For an actor who played a pumped – and frequently topless – biker for seven seasons of US TV drama Sons Of Anarchy, and who this year is filling the big screen as a mythic British king, a fabled early 20th-century explorer and a legendary convict escapee, the 36-year-old wears his charisma lightly. With his choppy hair, blonde stubble and elbow-patched, grey cotton shirt, Mr Hunnam looks more resting rocker than leading man. Fifty shades of grunge, anyone?


The Newcastle-born, LA-based actor studies the menu in the same quiet, thoughtful manner that, it transpires, he considers everything. He’ll have the vegetarian breakfast, please, with granary toast and a side of avocado. “I’m not a veggie,” clarifies Mr Hunnam in a soft Geordie accent still evident after 18 years in LA. “But I never see any point in meat at breakfast. I like a bit of smoked salmon, maybe a kipper. But I don’t do any sausages or bacon.”

I previously encountered Mr Hunnam in 2010, in his then-home on West Hollywood’s hipster thoroughfare, Melrose Avenue. He was about to begin filming the third series of Sons Of Anarchy. His was the hero role, that of Jax Teller, prodigal son of the founder of an outlaw Californian motorcycle chapter. Naturally lean, he bemoaned the gym time required to buff himself up to play the dynamic biker prince, and the concomitant loading up on white-meat protein. He was a long way from his breakthrough role, playing a callow, northern teenager in Mr Russell T Davies’ groundbreaking 1999 Manchester-set gay drama Queer As Folk.

“Now I realise that there are protein powders, vegan protein powders and all that ****,” Mr Hunnam says with a small smile of relief. “[Things] that feel a little kinder to the system rather than eating enormous amounts of solid protein every day.”

Even though he wrapped on the final 80-hours-per-week filming schedule of Sons Of Anarchy in 2014, fitness still matters to Mr Hunnam. But it’s the right kind of fitness.

“I have come to really like an active lifestyle,” says Mr Hunnam. “It was a bit of a challenge to begin with to find a routine that felt good. But equal to the physical rewards of feeling good and healthy and energised, just the mental clarity and emotional stability I find I get from working out have become pretty essential to my day-to-day life.”

A keen hiker, a legacy perhaps of a childhood spent in the Lake District, 18 months ago Mr Hunnam moved to a new home at the bottom of Runyon Canyon. “That’s lovely to have on the doorstep. I go up there most mornings about 6.00am, watch the sunrise. Sometimes double it up and go watch the sunset as well. And on my ambitious days, I do give it a bit of a run, but it’s usually just a fast walk.”

His neighbours are Ms Sam and Mr Aaron Taylor-Johnson. The first knock on the door to borrow a cup of sugar could have been problematic because, famously, at the 11th hour, Mr Hunnam dropped out of Ms Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades Of Grey film. In October 2013, it was announced that he was to play fabulously wealthy kink-merchant Christian Grey in the film adaptation of the gazillion-selling novel. A little over a month later, he quit. Northern Irish actor Mr Jamie Dornan gamely accepted the keys to the sex dungeon and disaster was averted. But it was a bruising time for all concerned.

Letting down Ms Taylor-Johnson, he admits, “was primarily the reason it was very, very difficult. And thankfully she is such a wonderful, kind, empathetic person, she understood. And we’ve actually remained friends.”

“I see them pretty regularly,” he says of the British directing/acting powerhouse couple, one half of whom appeared in The Journal last month. He notes with neighbourly, Anglo pride Mr Taylor-Johnson’s Golden Globes win earlier this year, for his role in Mr Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals. “Yeah, he’s doing great. I was so happy for him. I thought he was terrific in that film.”

Mr Hunnam does not regret bailing on a series that would have been the making of him, certainly in terms of box office and bank account. “It was a difficult decision, but I think it was the right decision,” he says. “But I really struggled. I mean, I’m incredibly indecisive when it comes to those big, big work decisions – and really, all decisions. I feel like we’re just ****ing inundated with having to make decisions in our lives, and it’s somewhat relentless.”

His reason was simple: with only five days between the end of Sons Of Anarchy and the beginning of production on Ms Taylor-Johnson’s film, he didn’t think he’d have time to switch gears and prepare mentally and emotionally. Even if his body was boudoir-ready.

Does he miss the UK, whether the small-town north of his childhood or the hurly burly of Manchester and London where his acting career began? “Ah, I miss my family a lot,” he says. His mother and father split when he was a child. Later today, after the MR PORTER shoot, he’s meeting his mother for dinner in Tunbridge Wells. His father, “a real serious guy from Newcastle” who was involved in nightclub security and the scrap metal trade, died four years ago.

Aside from three demanding film roles – two of which have allowed him to spend chunks of time back in the UK, much to his satisfaction – Mr Hunnam has developed three scripts, two real-life stories he’s producing with studio partners and one that he hopes to write himself.

Most recently, he was working in Serbia and Montenegro. The Balkan nations were standing in for French Guiana in a new adaption of Papillon. Mr Hunnam plays Henri Charrière, safecracker, convicted murderer (although he maintained his innocence) and author of the autobiographical account of his years incarcerated in the South American penal colony. (In the 1973 film, Mr Steve McQueen took that role.) Mr Rami Malek, star of cult TV series Mr Robot, is Mr Hunnam’s counterpart (originally played by Mr Dustin Hoffman).

Mr Hunnam grew up “with an enormous amount of reverence for that film. So the idea of redoing it was pretty terrifying. I wasn’t 100 per cent convinced of the value in it,” he admits. Yet he and the Danish director, award-winning Mr Michael Noer, agreed that this was not a remake, but “an independent adaptation of the source material. And it’s gritty and nasty and visceral. And I feel confident that we made a really good film. But it’s a dangerous game, putting yourself up for comparison with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.”

 

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To play the prisoner, doggedly bent on escaping his hellish incarceration, “I just starved myself. I was like a skeleton by the time I finished. Unfortunately, I smoke a lot of cigarettes as the character, so I just ended up chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee all day, every day, which is not the healthiest way to lose weight. But it’s certainly a way,” he smiles.

This – sweating it out in an actual dungeon rather than, say, gadding around in a sex dungeon – is the kind of thing that drives Mr Hunnam. That intensity is there, too, in the first of those films, which hit cinemas last month in the UK and this week in the US. In The Lost City Of Z, which was partly shot in Belfast, he plays British soldier-turned-adventurer Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett. He was a real-life hero of the Empire who repeatedly left his family to embark on Royal Geographical Society expeditions. Lieutenant Colonel Fawcett finally disappeared in the Amazonian jungle while trying to discover the civilisation of the film’s title. To play the part, Mr Hunnam denied himself both food – his weight fell again to about 10 stone (65kg) – and social contact.

“I decided to create a situation where I felt real loneliness, and the weight of that sacrifice emotionally,” he says. “So I cut everybody out of my life for the entirety of the four-month shoot.”

I find myself almost choking on my kipper. There’s Method, and there’s madness. Mr Hunnam shrugs and smiles. “Switched my phone off. Had no email. Didn’t go on the internet once. Didn’t watch a movie. Didn’t make a phone call for four months.” Mr Hunnam somehow managed to hang on to his long-term girlfriend, the jewellery designer Ms Morgana McNelis, during this episode.

Mr Hunnam will also soon be seen as the lead in King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword. Mr Guy Ritchie’s typically energetic retelling of the sword-in-the-stone yarn also stars Mr Jude Law. It was a long shoot, and a challenging one, especially for Mr Hunnam, who had to embrace the essential “Guy-ness” of his shoot-from-the-hip director. “I tend to have a sort of tortured, laboured approach to work,” says Mr Hunnam. “Guy said, ‘**** all that. That’s not the kind of work I do.’”

Alongside Mr Hunnam, the film is notable for featuring Mr Ritchie’s fellow flat-cap enthusiast, Mr David Beckham. He plays a scar-faced henchman of Mr Law’s evil regent. “David Beckham asked me my opinion a few times on different bits and bobs,” says Mr Hunnam. “I don’t know if it was any help or not, but I was really blown away. It became very clear why and how Beckham’s become the phenomenon that he has. Because he showed up determined to do a good job. He’d worked with a dialect coach, and maybe an acting coach. I sort of anticipated, well, he’s a superstar. This is not his primary or even his secondary focus; this is just a bit of a giggle for him. But that work ethic just shone through.

“And that, combined with him just being humble and kind and accessible, was very endearing. I’m not a football man, so upfront, I didn’t really have a strong feeling one or way or another. But by the time he left, I had a little bit of a crush on him. He was pretty ****ing cool.”


“I switched my phone off. Had no email. Didn’t go on the internet once. Didn’t watch
a movie. Didn’t make a call for four months”


When the publicity tour for the raft of films he’s got coming out this year is over, Mr Hunnam will go to Thailand with Ms McNelis. It will be his first holiday in seven or eight years. “But I have so much anxiety about the prospect of not working for two weeks,” he says, laughing at himself.

Has he ever thought about therapy?

“No,” he says, ruminating on avocado and toast. “I read a lot of books about the human condition, and about where we are, trying to understand some of the things that I deal with. But I’ve never had therapy. Again, it’s really been a matter of finding the time to sit down and dedicate time to it. I do think it would be really useful. I’d say that the majority of people I know who seem to be cracking on and know themselves very well and have very well-balanced approaches to life seem to have done a lot of work in therapy.”

 

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EXCLUSIVE: Charlie Hunnam Thanks 'Incredible Girlfriend' After Ghosting Her for 5 Months for 'Lost City of Z'

Dating Charlie Hunnam isn’t as glamorous as it seems when he’s preparing for a role! The hunky Lost City of Z star, 36, went full method for his new role as isolated British explorer Percy Fawcett and opened up to ET about his girlfriend paying the price.

Hunnam previously revealed he didn't communicate with his girlfriend of 11 years, Morgana McNelis, for five months while they were shooting in the film in Colombia.
It's a tough job trying to bring characters to life, so whatever you can do to limit the amount of actual acting and work you have to do on set,” he explained to ET’s Ashley Crossan at the Los Angeles premiere of the film. "A lot of the theme of this film is about the conflict of trying to do what we want for ourselves and our lives and bringing forth our personal aspirations and dreams for ourselves, and the conflict of how that affects the other people in our lives and our other responsibilities. So I just wanted to feel lonely and selfish so it worked. Thankfully, I have an incredible girlfriend who's very, very understanding and supportive of these silly whims that I have.”

And as the actor approaches 40 -- he turns 37 on Monday! -- he's looking forward to a building a more a stable life with her that probably doesn't involve five months of the silent treatment!

"I've got three more years til the big 4-0, I don't know, it feels significant, 40 feels really significant for some reason," he said. "It's just a number like any other but I gotta start having some kids, get married, start being sensible in my life."

While Hunnam himself shied away from calling his approach to the role“method," his co-star Sienna Miller praised him for it.

“He was very method in an amazingly impressive way,” Miller told ET. “He was starving himself half the time, he didn't speak to his [girlfriend] at all, and she's amazing. But he really buried himself into it and he has an intensity and I think it really resonates in the film but we had a lovely time because our dynamic in the film is lovely.”

And Hunnam’s longtime love wasn’t the only one he distanced himself from throughout the filming process. His co-star, Robert Pattinson also got the cold shoulder. But now that filming has stopped, the pair can finally hang out as friends.

“It's nice actually to come out of that fog of the production and see that he's a lovely guy,” Hunnam said of Pattinson. “I can actually enjoy having a drink with him now and a hang.”

Hunnam noted that his decision to remain aloof on set was a calculated one on his part.

“There was something really exciting about the idea of not knowing someone, just letting a relationship exist exclusively on the screen and so I had decided that I wanted to do that,” he said. “But sometimes that can be alienating, and put another actor off of their work and I don't want to be that selfish. I mean, I'll be selfish in my personal life, but I got on and I started playing this game with Rob and he just started playing it right back. I think we both really understood what we were doing and there was no real contention or beef between us, that we were just playing the game.”

 

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I want to see a movie with these two together and pronto!

 

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