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He’s blonde, charming and first had teens going “Who IS that?” in the film version of Dickens’ classic Nicholas Nickleby. If you aren’t into the classics, you might have caught Charlie Hunnam as Katie Holmes’ crazy ex-boyfriend in the thriller Abandon. A veteran of Brit teen drama series and the U.K. TV hit “Queer as Folk”, Charlie was chosen by World Karate and Kickboxing champion Lexi Alexander when she turned film director and was casting the intense soccer/football drama Green Street Hooligans. (Warning: This movie is R-rated and the violence gets pretty intense).
Playing the charismatic leader of a Brit “firm” of young, over-the-top soccer fans, Charlie combines a very rough edge with an emotional good guy core. He and co-star Elijah Wood became fast friends on the set. Both guys admit that, before working on the film, they knew next to nothing about Brit football and the gangs that take fandom to a whole, violent new level.
Charlie, now a Hollywood resident, picture tan stripe shirt over white tee and choppy blonde hair, sat down a while to tell us all about his new film, bonding with Elijah and the other guys during and before shooting, training to be a street fighter, what his musical tastes are and playing a real tough guy for the first time.
TeenHollywood: What kind of research did you have to do for this? Did you hang around with the real hooligan guys?
Charlie: Yeah, I did. I knew nothing about football, about soccer at all. I’d never been to a football match and never watched it on TV. Being a film fan, if I had ninety minutes to spare, I was going to watch a film not a football match. So, I had to completely go and educate myself, not only on hooliganism but on the game itself because you can’t go and try to integrate yourself into these groups without first knowing how to talk about football. Leo Gregory [fellow actor in the film] was really great with me through all of this because he walks the walk and talks the talk and is absolutely fanatical about football so he came over for three weeks about three months before we were about to start shooting. I’m pretty skinny in my day to day life and I wanted to feel as intimidating physically as possible and put on about 25, 28 pounds throughout the rehearsal period to get big. So, we just went to the gym a lot. And we got over to England and started going to every single football match that we could.
TeenHollywood: Are you a fan?
Charlie: Not of the game itself but I did really, really enjoy going to the matches. I love the human aspect of football, the humor involved and the electricity. It’s just great to be surrounded by people, which is I guess the same feeling you get in a concert maybe but that like “now” feeling of life where everybody is just happy to be here in the moment. It’s just what they want to be doing. It’s just so rare in this day and age. Joseph Campbell talks a lot about following your bliss and just doing what you want to do even if it’s just for an hour a day. That’s, to me, what football is to so many people and sports in general. It just is that bliss.
TeenHollywood: Did you get any insight into how these guys maintain that immaturity? Does no one ever tell them that fighting doesn’t make the team any better and living your life to fight people really isn’t that cool?
Charlie: [laughs] Well, it’s a brave man that’s gonna sit down and tell these guys that for starters. I agree to some extent but you’re also underestimating maybe how little these people have in their lives and what a kind of family and sense of belonging this gives them. It’s not really about the fighting itself. It’s about the adrenalin. In America you have five hundred trillion amusement parks and roller coasters all over the place and it’s all about adrenalin.
TeenHollywood: So, to them, it’s like a family?
Charlie: Yeah. So, basically, these guys have an opportunity to belong to something and they’re legends in their neighborhoods. It permeates everything, the notoriety that they achieve through this. It always kind of reminded me of that line in Goodfellas ‘We’re movie stars with muscle’. Nobody messes with these guys. When they walk into a bar on Saturday before the match, every single guy in the bar will cheer and there’s a lot of slaps on the back and a lot of handshakes and they can’t buy themselves a drink. It really makes them belong.
TeenHollywood: What kind of fight training did you do for those big scenes?
Charlie: There is so little technique to the actual style of hooligan fighting so, our training was about being in control of our bodies so that, while appearing to be very sloppy, we wouldn't actually hurt anybody. We trained with this guy called Pat Johnson whose absolutely formidable character. He’s late 60’s and he would lead us by example. He’s actually the man who is responsible for the Karate Kid crane [demonstrates] you know the one-handed kick. He was actually one of the fighters in Chuck Norris’s fight team. Of 198 bare knuckle fights he had, he won 196 in knockouts so he’s certainly a man who is qualified to teach us how to throw a punch. He was just a little kind of fatherly figure who would come and talk to us about the responsibility that the things he was teaching us carried with it because he’s teaching us some very, very efficient ways to take the other guy down that you would hope people would be responsible enough never to employ.
TeenHollywood: How did the role in this film come to you?
Charlie: I’d intentionally been out of work for eighteen months because I did a couple of things early in my career, film work that I didn’t feel like I was fully suited for and was very aware early on that my vision for the piece and the director’s weren’t unified so there was going to be a struggle all the way to achieve what I wanted to achieve. I had to acquiesce to the director. So, I decided that I was never going to put myself in that position again. I was going to wait for something that I was absolutely on the same page with and had the same vision. I read the script and obviously it’s fascinating subject matter. It was an incredible part but it was really more about Lexi and sitting down with her. I know exactly the filmmakers that I would like to work with but I’m not really at a position in my career yet where I have the opportunity to work with the really established greats. And, so I kind of set about looking for the next generation of great directors and I just had a really, really good feeling about Lexi.
TeenHollywood: When you first started acting did you think you would be playing this kind of tough guy character?
Charlie: Well, I come from a very tough area and my dad’s certainly a man who is very well respected in the small city that we come from as a man never to cross. So, I grew up with a healthy amount of metal in my blood so it was actually very easy for me to play this. I find the physicality of roles the least challenging of the process. I struggle more with dialect work than actual physicality.
TeenHollywood: How did the bonding process between you and the other actors go? Did Lexi encourage you to get together and go to a bar where the guys in the film hang out?
Charlie: I went over three months early because I wanted to start walking his walk and had to completely integrate myself into this world so I was over there and slowly all the other guys, as they started to get hired, would go every Wednesday and every Saturday to watch West Hamm play and so they would start coming along there and there was drinking involved. I play a lot of poker so I would always be arranging poker games for everyone. Then, two and a half weeks before we started filming, we started a very, very intensive rehearsal schedule where we were rehearsing all day long and then going out and drinking in the evening which was as per Lexi’s instructions so we just got very, very close.
TeenHollywood: Did that include Elijah?
Charlie: Lexi intentionally didn’t invite Elijah to come over and join us until about a week before so he was definitely odd man out when he arrived but he fit in very quickly. Lexi is just very smart the way she approaches directing, especially since this was her first feature.
TeenHollywood: Some people in England have said that the film was Americanized and I wondered what your take on that was.
Charlie: Even just having an American protagonist is enough to provoke the English press. The English press are just very tricky especially when dealing with any subject matter that is so close to home, yet being handled by kind of an outsider. So I think they would have said that regardless of the final product just knowing that it was American money and with an American star. We had an obligation to explain a lot to an American audience that just never would have known but I don’t think it’s really overly exposition heavy. It think that we explain a little more than an English audience would need to be explained to; exactly the nature of firms and football violence but basically, I think the story can be just as enjoyed by an English audience as an American one.
TeenHollywood: These fights are very graphic but we hear nobody was hurt badly.
Charlie: I hurt myself a little bit but nothing major. [Trainer] Pat Johnson was very eager for nothing to go wrong. He kept saying, ‘there’s absolutely no reason that anybody should get hurt throughout the course of filming’. We really took that responsibility seriously. I mean we we’re throwing pretty vicious punches and, if you don’t concentrate and if you do connect, people are just going to get their noses and faces broken.
TeenHollywood: Were there any rules to real-life hooligan fighting that you picked up?
Charlie: You know, there aren’t really many rules. The guys that I knew, for the most part, prided themselves on not using weapons. But, it wasn’t by any kind of moral obligation to follow any kind of predetermined rules that had been set up. It was more like ‘these guys need weapons? We’ll show them who the real boys are. Come get us. We’ll take on knives, bricks, all comers, just use our fists’. It was really serious. West Hamm boys are some of the hardest firm members in England.
TeenHollywood: Did you have kind of an advisor among the actual gang (firm) members?
Charlie: There was this young guy, he was 28 years old. He’s fifteen years his brother’s junior and his older brother had been one of the top boys in the firm and he was just now coming up through the ranks and was now second or third boy in the firm. He really just took me under his wing and he was exactly as [my character] Pete is in the film, kind of happy go lucky, charismatic, gregarious in a lot of ways, a very compassionate man but had the capacity just to flip and really assert himself and get into some naughtiness and some mischief. An interesting guy and basically, all the work I did, I just kept him in the back of my mind.
TeenHollywood: How are you like Pete?
Charlie: [laughs] Well, I don’t back down very easily in anything really. I’ve got a lot of pride and I definitely think that being a man, and I don’t say that in a misogynistic way at all, I just mean being proud of yourself and being the kind of person you should be is important. Just having respect and loyalty and all that kind of stuff, I definitely had a lot of respect for everything that he stood for. I think that I try to live my life to those principals.
TeenHollywood: Is Elijah kind of a rock star in England because of The Lord of the Rings?
Charlie: Yeah, he’s obviously very famous and it was the height of it. I think the last one had just come out. He very, very quickly integrated himself into the group. There was a lot of fun to be had and those guys continued to go out all the way through production. They were going out having wild nights and stuff. I can’t do that. I was going home, being very boring and going to the gym because the body is an amazing thing and if you don’t keep maintaining muscle weight you put on, muscles will just atrophy and you’ll drop the weight instantly. And I’d put on, like I said, almost 30 pounds and within a month of finishing shooting I was down to my regular size. I just had to go home, go to the gym every night and kind of get a night’s sleep. There was a lot of work to do. We shot this film in five weeks, 31 days I think.
TeenHollywood: Do you keep up any of the routine?
Charlie: I stay fit. I don’t like lifting weights. I was eating four meals a day and snacking in between and then just lifting weights six hours a day and then I’d do a little bit of boxing. Boxing is great exercise and a lot of fun but I just get lazy in between jobs. I swim and that’s about it.
TeenHollywood: Did you have interest now in seeing more games?
Charlie: It would be fun to meet up with all the boys and go to a football match, just a little nostalgic trip but I really… like I say, I was enthralled by the human aspect of football but I was never, ever compelled by the game. I played rugby at school. I wasn’t much of a football player.
TeenHollywood: What kind of music are you into?
Charlie: I listen to everything really, a broad spectrum of music. Some of favorites are, I love Van Morrison, Tom Waits, that kind of music. On the other side, I’m also a huge hip hop fan. Just depends on my mood. Obviously a lot of film scores and soundtracks as well.
TeenHollywood: Favorite hip hop artist?
Charlie: I have a million but to pick one I’d probably say RZA from Wu-Tang Clan.
TeenHollywood: What’s coming up for you?
Charlie: I’m just going in two or three days to England to do a little part in the new Alfonso Cuaron film Children of Men it’s called.
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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.