Charlie Hunnam Originally Got His Name Thrown out When He Was Suggested for ‘King Arthur’
Charlie Hunnam went from playing Jax in Sons of Anarchy to starring in King Arthur as the titular hero. But initially, Hunnam was far from the director’s ideal choice for the role.
How Charlie Hunnam convinced his ‘King Arthur’ director to give him a chance
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was a 2017 contemporary re-imagining of the medieval legend. It was directed by Guy Ritchie, who admittedly had a lot of doubts about modernizing the movie.
“I had a two week existential crisis, where I’m convinced I’ve made the worst mistake in the world,” Ritchie said to ABC News. “And then the phoenix of confidence rises out of the ashes. And then gradually you find your momentum the film finds its own way.”
When he was searching for someone to cast as the titular hero, Hunnam was the first to volunteer. But Ritchie wasn’t interested in the Pacific Rim star at the time.
“I heard the guy was doing King Arthur and I promptly threw my name in the hat,” Hunnam said, “And Guy threw it back out.”
But Hunnam was eventually able to charm Ritchie with his enthusiasm.
“I jumped on a plane and showed up on his doorstep and said, ‘Let’s have a cup of tea,'” Hunnam said. “By the end of that cup of tea, I think he decided he quite liked me, so he let me audition and I finally got the job. So it was a happy tale in the end.”
Why it took Charlie Hunnam a couple of weeks to get used to Guy Ritchie’s filmmaking in ‘King Arthur’
As much of a Ritchie fan as Hunnam was, it took a while before Hunnam adjusted to Ritchie’s style. In an interview with Den of Geek, Hunnam touched on Ritchie’s habit of going off script. The unfamiliar process actually made for an intriguing collaboration for Hunnam.
“No, really, it took me a couple of weeks to get used to that. Um, but it was an interesting period of revelation, I think for all of us,” he said. “There’s something that happened on this film – which is always true, but it was very dramatic on this film – which is that the film itself becomes a significant collaborator, and kind of dictates what it wants to be to be, to the filmmaking community.”
Hunnam asserted that even the Wrath of Man director was surprised with the direction the movie went in.
“And we went in to this with a blueprint, and it became abundantly clear, in the first few days of filming, that it was just a blueprint. We were going to be working in real time, and it was going to evolve very rapidly,” he said. “But I think, even Guy was surprised by the dramatic evolution on the day, and that the film itself was telling us that it didn’t want, tonally, to be what we wanted it to be or perceived that it should be. Which was much more sort of classic, and linear, and somber, you know?”
Charlie Hunnam had to hire a dialect coach to regain his accent for ‘King Arthur’
Hunnam had been playing an American for so long in Sons of Anarchy that it affected his accent. This posed a problem when Hunnam was set to play the English hero.
“I’ve been in America for so long and acting with American dialects and put an enormous amount of time and energy into learning an American dialect to get it as flawless as I could that, by the time I got hired to return back to England, I had adopted just naturally those cadences and inflection,” he once said according to Contact Music.
To get back to his natural accent, Hunnam needed help.
“So I hired a dialect coach to help me get back into the right rhythm of British speech. But, also, I’m from the North and this takes place in London in the South and those are very different dialects. So, even the English that remained in my dialect wasn’t appropriate for this. So, I had to work hard,” he said.
