Charlie Hunnam has opened up about the stresses of turning down the role of Christian Grey in the forthcoming movie adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey.
The actor was announced as the lead, opposite Dakota Johnson, by none other than the book’s author EL James, but he later pulled out of the role citing scheduling difficulties. Reports flew around that Hunnam had quit thanks to “cold feet”, that he was troubled by the level of attention he had received and that his creative input on the film had been rebuffed.
Now Hunnam has elaborated on his reasons, describing a “nervous breakdown”.
“It was a really, really difficult time in my life,” he told Moviefone. He explained that he met with director Sam Taylor-Johnson intending to tell her he could not do the film. “And then I just fell in love, creatively,” he said, “I started talking about this thing and I just got so excited. I fell in love with the character and started seeing him and becoming intoxicated, which is the way I work: I find a character I love and I start thinking about it all the time.”
The commitments that prompted Hunnam to initially say no were still around, however: wrapping up his role in the TV biker drama Sons of Anarchy and work on Guillermo del Toro’s film Crimson Peak. “I was going to finish Sons at like 11pm Friday night, get on the plane Saturday morning to Vancouver for Fifty, missing the whole first week of rehearsal and start shooting Monday morning,” Hunnam said. “And I was going to shoot that film, wrap that on the Wednesday, and the following Monday I was going to start shooting Crimson Peak in Toronto. I just had like … frankly, something of a nervous breakdown.
“I just said, ‘I can’t, I can’t … Fifty’s going to be massive, it’s going to be huge. I really didn’t want to fail on such a grand scale and I just couldn’t transition from Jax Teller to Christian Grey in 48 hours. I bit off more than I could chew and it was painful. I loved the character and I wanted to do it … It was one of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations.”
Hunnam was replaced by fellow Brit Jamie Dornan and anticipation has rocketed. Fifty Shades of Grey’s trailer is now the most viewed of 2014. The film will be released on 12 February in Australia, and a day later in the US and UK.
