King Of The Road

Whether running a motorcycle gang or ruling medieval empires, Charlie Hunnam does it all with rugged swagger– and poetry at the ready

 

- Mickey Rapkin

In this month’s slick, Guy Ritchie-directed King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword, Charlie Hunnam plays the titular character, whose circumstances are upended when he pulls a sword from a stone. The film may be yet another fantastical retelling of the classic legend, but the story resonates with the 37-year-old, who was raised in rough-and-tumble Newcastle, England. His parents split when he was young and Hunnam, who was discovered in a shoe store, moved to the US at age 18, married a woman he met at an audition for Dawson’s Creek, struggled to find work, got divorced, then found fame in an unlikely place: on the gritty TV series Sons Of Anarchy. The show was positively Shakespearean in its drama, not unlike Hunnam’s life off-screen: last year, the actor was forced to make a public plea for fans to stop harassing his long-time girlfriend, jewellery designer Morgana McNelis. Imagine how intense things could have become if he hadn’t backed out of starring in 2015’s Fifty Shades Of Grey. He cites a scheduling conflict – but a certain phobia revealed in our conversation here makes us think there could have been another reason...

ELLE: A few stories we’ve read described your dad as a “gangster”. True?

CHARLIE HUNNAM: No, he was a scrap-metal man. If, say, a coal mine or a shipyard goes down, there’s an opportunity to go and strip scrap metal and melt it down. It’s incredibly valuable, completely untraceable and very desirable to steal. Everybody understands that if you fuck around, there will be serious consequences. That’s where his reputation came into play. He was very well-known, even feared. But he wasn’t into making money illegally, which is my definition of a gangster.