Char­lie Hun­nam: ​‘Mod­ern life is not par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing to me’

It’s rare to find a com­mon­al­i­ty with an in-demand movie star, but as we sit down to begin our chat, Char­lie Hun­nam absent-mind­ed­ly fid­dles with the tam­per-evi­dent band on his water bot­tle. He breaks it apart and lines the pieces up in his hand. If I had a bot­tle in my hand, I’d prob­a­bly start doing the same thing. It’s a small, dis­arm­ing detail that speaks to the actor’s easy­go­ing, approach­able nature. We spoke about his roles in The Lost City of Z, King Arthur: Leg­end of the Sword and Papil­lon, and the dif­fer­ent demands each film placed on him.

LWLies: Did you shoot King Arthur and The Lost City of Z close together?

Hun­nam: Yeah, I had 10 days between wrap­ping Arthur and start­ing this.

What was it like going from work­ing under Guy Ritchie to James Gray?

Not as big of a tran­si­tion as one might imag­ine. Ulti­mate­ly, I always try to put as much truth and per­son­al expe­ri­ence into the inter­pre­ta­tion of a role, and although their process­es are very, very dif­fer­ent, my process is the same. The require­ments were much hefti­er on Lost City, and I was much more aware of them and the job I was going to have. I sup­pose the biggest dif­fer­ence, day to day, was that there was some­thing very con­crete and absolute about what we were doing on Lost City, where­as there was some­thing a bit more freeform on Arthur. There was a slight ambi­gu­i­ty around what the tone and sen­si­bil­i­ty would be when we set out on that project – although you wouldn’t imag­ine that because Guy has got such a spe­cif­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty as a film­mak­er and has a brand of his own with­in the film­mak­ing community.

There was an ini­tial aspi­ra­tion to do some­thing very dif­fer­ent and have a depar­ture from what you would expand from Guy. But then once we got into the film… I don’t know if it was that the film, the con­struct of it was demand­ing a lighter tone, or if it was Guy’s cre­ative com­pass pulling him back to true north, but we end­ed up evolv­ing out of that and into some­thing that’s more typ­i­cal­ly Guy Ritchie. But it was dif­fi­cult to pin down what that tone was going to be to begin with, which was a real challenge.

When you speak about Gray’s require­ments for Lost City, can you give some exam­ples of that?

I sup­pose truth is the great­est thing. He is an incred­i­bly per­son­al film­mak­er, and so he knew the truth that he want­ed to imbue the film with, and the themes of the film were things that were very rel­e­vant to him and his life. We spent… I was going to say a lot of time, but that’s actu­al­ly not the truth. I think the rea­son that he hired me in the first place is when I went in and spoke to him, a lot of the themes that he was clear­ly explor­ing in the script felt very rel­e­vant to me and I could real­ly relate to them, and so I guess that’s prob­a­bly why he hired me. He is ulti­mate­ly in search of some sort of per­son­al truth in his film­mak­ing, which he demands of him­self and every­body else that he works with.

If there’s any cen­tral man­date from James, it’s to deliv­er truth every day, as opposed to Guy, who gave me a very spe­cif­ic man­date. Because I can tend to be a lit­tle bit over­ly earnest and self-impor­tant in my approach to film­mak­ing, he said, ​‘For­get all that shit. This is not the game we’re play­ing here. You have to fun every day, and if we both have fun, we’re going to make a fun film.’ I sup­pose that was prob­a­bly, now that we’re talk­ing about it and exam­in­ing it a bit more close­ly, the most sig­nif­i­cant difference.

Do peri­od films have a spe­cif­ic draw for you, or is this just how your roles have hap­pened to shake out over the past few years?

Mod­ern life… the uni­fy­ing expe­ri­ences of mod­ern life are not par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing to me. I’m not inter­est­ed as much in telling nar­ra­tives about the prob­lems of dat­ing in the twen­tysome­thing com­mu­ni­ty in Los Ange­les. That’s not of inter­est to me in my life, so it’s not an inter­est for me to tell in sto­ries. I’m always drawn to sto­ries that have some­thing to do with the human con­di­tion, but using real, relat­able peo­ple who find them­selves doing extra­or­di­nary things. That seems to be the nar­ra­tive that I’m drawn to the most.

You’re also star­ring in a new ​‘Papil­lon’ adap­ta­tion this year. How much research do you do for these types of roles?

As much as pos­si­ble. There’s a real sense of oblig­a­tion and respon­si­bil­i­ty while play­ing a real per­son. And obvi­ous­ly, once you’ve done all the research, then you have to go and find the things that you have in com­mon, and try to meet the char­ac­ter halfway and bring in as much of your truth to what you per­ceive to be the cen­tral gov­ern­ing prin­ci­ples of that life. I was real­ly up against it on Lost City because of the short time before start­ing it after King Arthur, so I was lim­it­ed in the amount of research I could do. But obvi­ous­ly I read the David Grann book that the film is an adap­ta­tion of. What was an even more valu­able resource to me was ​‘Explo­ration Faw­cett’, a book com­piled by [Per­cy] Fawcett’s son Bri­an, which was basi­cal­ly a col­lec­tion of excerpts from Fawcett’s journals.

For Papil­lon, just in terms of our approach, direc­tor Michael Noer and I com­plete­ly lib­er­at­ed our­selves from the expec­ta­tion or the weight of view­ing this as a remake of the orig­i­nal film. After all, it’s actu­al­ly a true sto­ry and based on a very sig­nif­i­cant piece of source mate­r­i­al. So we released that vast sense of fill­ing the shoes of Steve McQueen or Dustin Hoff­man or Trum­bo or any of those guys, and real­ly decid­ed we were just going to be uncom­pro­mis­ing in our approach, that this was our inde­pen­dent adap­ta­tion and had noth­ing to do with the pri­or movie. Which was an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion for us to make, because we could have just got­ten our­selves total­ly head­fucked, because it’s such a sig­nif­i­cant and beloved film, and a very impor­tant film to me in my youth, as was the novel.

Did you learn any rel­e­vant skills for Lost City or Papil­lon, for the sake of authenticity?

I don’t know. I nev­er went to dra­ma school. I went to film school to study film the­o­ry, so I don’t real­ly know about act­ing tech­nique and method and all of that kind of stuff. I feel like all actors, to one degree or anoth­er, do what they think is required of the role. Some­times those things can very con­ve­nient­ly be put into the method brack­et, but ulti­mate­ly that doesn’t real­ly mean anything.

Lost City deals with a lot of the sense of sac­ri­fice that peo­ple make in their lives when they have iden­ti­fied a cer­tain call­ing, and the com­pro­mis­es that they have to make in oth­er ele­ments of their lives. I thought that was a very impor­tant part of Fawcett’s jour­ney, the sense of lone­li­ness he must have felt, and sac­ri­fice, and the weight of the sac­ri­fice he was mak­ing with his fam­i­ly to carve out the time that he need­ed to go and do this thing that he was try­ing to do.

I was ner­vous about the breadth of the emo­tion­al jour­ney in the film, and so I decid­ed to do every­thing one can do to lim­it the amount of work one has to do in the moments between action and cut. So I just put myself in that sit­u­a­tion – I cut myself off com­plete­ly from the world. I didn’t talk to my girl­friend for four months. I didn’t send an email or make a phone call or have any inter­ac­tion at all with the out­side world, or talk to any­body on set.

On Papil­lon, there were sec­tions of the film where the main char­ac­ter is com­plete­ly seg­re­gat­ed in soli­tary con­fine­ment, and for that sec­tion, I nev­er left soli­tary. I slept there and lived there and remained silent the entire time and didn’t talk to any­one. I think peo­ple don’t real­ly under­stand much about act­ing – me being one of them – but peo­ple like to give some­thing a label. It feels con­ve­nient, so any time you talk about doing any­thing that would appear extreme, peo­ple like to label it as method, but real­ly it’s just about try­ing to do as good a job as you can do.

The Lost City of Z is in US cin­e­mas from 14 April. King Arthur: Leg­end of the Sword is released 12 May.