How the biggest bomb of Charlie Hunnam’s career became a full-circle moment
Charlie Hunnam has had a fine career, making the difficult jump from British TV to mainstream Hollywood success, and we applaud him for that.
The problem is trying to work out how much of it is undone by his ‘cockney’ accent in the 2005 football hooligan film Green Street, alongside Elijah Wood, which is actually impressive in that it sounds less authentically East London than Wood’s American one.
It’s not as bad as Don Cheadle’s ‘Brih-ish’ accent in Ocean’s 11, granted, and it isn’t quite on a par with Keanu Reeves’ effort in Dracula, so we’ll forgive Hunnam for that and instead concentrate on his excellent work in the likes of Sons of Anarchy and The Gentlemen.
To give the man some more credit, he only waited a year after Green Street to put in a superb showing in a small role in Alfonso Cuarón’s brilliant Children of Men with Clive Owen, and then he really kicked into gear after landing a leading part in FX’s motorcycle gang drama Sons of Anarchy which ran for seven seasons to huge acclaim, with Hunnam picking up a Critic’s Choice nomination for ‘Best Actor’.
It led to him being seen as a bona fide star and someone who could definitely be cast as an action hero, which came to fruition when he was cast alongside Idris Elba in the massive monsters meet robots Guillermo del Toro movie Pacific Rim, a film that grossed almost half a billion dollars at the box office and also has some of the cheesiest dialogue ever committed to celluloid.
After that came Hunnam’s first brush with director Guy Ritchie in the ill-fated big screen reboot King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. A fairly unwatchable mess with one of the worst opening ten minutes in living memory, it bombed hard at the box office and did Hunnam’s career no favours, given he was the leading man in the titular role.
In filming the project though, he felt it brought him full circle from his early beginnings, saying, “I have been on this journey in my life, and the beginning of my career in film I feel like started when I was six years old, seven years old, watching Excalibur over and over again.”
He elaborated on how he realised what goes on behind the scenes is what struck him the most, noting, “It was the first time that I recognised that I saw the process beyond just being told the story and started to get interested in the logistics of filmmaking… And it really was the moment where I said, ‘Okay, I am going to spend my life trying to pursue being an actor’.”
And Hunnam, who had admired Ritchie’s work over the previous two decades, was evidently excited to be given the chance to bring a childhood hero to life, as he added, “It certainly inspired a moment of reflection when I got this role, because I thought, how amazing for this journey to have started for me with King Arthur, and here I am, 30 years later, being hired by one of my favorite directors to play this role.”
The relative disappointment at King Arthur’s box office performance didn’t stop Hunnam and Ritchie teaming up again, however, and two years later they did so far more successfully with the super-slick London gangster flick The Gentlemen, with the actor putting in a great shift as gangland enforcer Raymond Smith. It was a big success and spawned an equally popular series on Netflix starring Theo James.
Hunnam is now about to be seen as a master thief in Criminal, a comic book adaptation from Prime Video that also stars Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke and Richard Jenkins of Step Brothers fame.
