Charlie Hunnam Quotes

1. (on being picky choosing roles) When some films do not pay as well and you have a mortgage to pay and you are on an economy drive eating eggs and beans, and you are offered a million dollar role and you turn it down, as it is not right. I want to be doing this when I am 60 and getting the big paying roles then so I have to pick the parts that are right for the long term rather than take the money now.

2. I got expelled from high school, and then did my exams from home. I decided, through that experience, that I was going to expediate my plan and didn't go to university. Instead, I went to a community college and studied the theory and history of film with the idea that I wanted to write and direct.

3. I always think it's better to take a smaller role in a great film rather than a leading role in something that you don't have complete faith in. 






4. I was a slightly melancholy child and I think films were a way of escaping for me.

5. I'm not very good at most things, but I'm pretty good at relationships. I grew up with a single mother, so she kind of drummed into us - being chivalrous and treating our partners well and not being a total asshole. So I've gotten along well with the fathers-in-law.

6. (on his role in Children of Men - 2006) This is kind of my trilogy of madmen. I played the psycho in "Cold Mountain" (2003), my character in "Hooligans" (2005) (aka Green Street) is fairly psychotic and now I've got this role. 




7. I realize few people get to live the life they always wanted, but I'm so neurotic, I don't really think about it. I'm too busy thinking: "I hope I don't screw up my next scene."

8. I knew nothing about football at all. I had never been to a football match and never watched it on TV. Being a film fan, if I had 90 minutes to spare, I was going to watch a film, not a football match.



9. I have lived in Los Angeles for four years and I have been in night clubs three times and two movie premieres. I just don't get involved.

10. No, I do a bunch of things to entertain myself. I paint, I make music, I take photographs.

11. I enjoyed the challenge as a one-off experience. I don't think I'm going to do comedy any time soon. My dad was a very well-known gangster in Northern England; I come from, like, a crime family, and so I stepped away from that and I have nothing to do with that at all. But my area of interest still seems to be drawn to that. I write a great deal, I have a few projects in development, and all the time I feel drawn to those stories. 

12. I was a little bit wary of playing Nicholas. In the script, which I think is true of the novel and the film, he's the only character not singing and dancing in a musical style. Playing someone who is the personification of good is a little difficult.

13. I'm happy being an actor, it's what I have always wanted to do. I'm just lucky I got to do it so early.





14. They cast me because I was known from a TV show and had a big American film coming out. Even English films are geared towards American audiences.

15. I guess to pick one genre of music it'd be folk. I listen to a lot of folk music. But I also, you know, I listen to like, you know, some you know, blues and bluegrass and like a huge hip-hop fan when I'm in the right mood. And but yeah, mainly folk music. 





16. I watch these actors who when you go to buy a pint of milk you see them smiling on the cover of 20 magazines. Then when you see them in a film it's hard to believe the character because you just see them everywhere.

17. (when asked what he enjoyed most about visiting the Playboy Mansion; meeting Hugh or the Bunnies?) I was actually more excited to meet the animals. I'm an animal lover. He has a huge variety of animals out back. 


18. A lot of my friends are gangsters. Not like gangsters - well, yeah, all sorts of levels of criminality - but not the types that are preying on innocent people. I have no interest in the type of criminality that has no respect for collateral damage.

19. I was playing pretty boys and these angelic roles like Nicholas Nickleby and all that stuff. And I was like: "What am I doing? This isn't who I am, as a man or an artist." I had to overcome people's belief that I was too pretty to be a badass.

20. I'm reading scripts, desperately wanting to work. I've set a couple of things up for next year.

21. I'm currently doing Undeclared an American TV show set in a college. It just got aired and got massive ratings so hopefully that'll screen in the UK soon.

22. And I just want to work with good directors and good people.

23. If I went to them all dressed up and flashed a nice smile for the cameras it would probably be easier for me to get work. But I just can't tolerate it.

24. In a work capacity I'm only interested in acting and producing.

25. If I'd seen a grown man beating a crippled boy, of course I'd intervene. If my father died and left my mother destitute, it's your instinct to take care of her. So when I started to think about it in those terms, it started to make sense to me.

26. Everybody, at some point in their life, has fallen down and not felt like getting back up, but you have to, no matter how difficult it is.

27. It could be my downfall, but I don't think it is - Hollywood is run on perception, and if you stray off the path of what you want to do with your career, it's suicide.



28. It's generally more fun playing the villain.

29. So I try not to do press and if you can keep the balance of keeping a certain degree of anonymity and do interesting work then you can hope for a degree of career longevity.



30. Good roles are hard to come by, and whether they're a few lines or a lead, you snap 'em up when they come along.

31. You go through this business and you meet people that you bond with, and you get to go make movies with them. It's wonderful. What I've always dreamt of, in my career, is to have a brotherhood of collaborators, and go in and out of working with them. I'm just starting to get that, and it's really lovely.

32. In the early part of your career you are always compared with somebody until you can stand on your own two feet.

33. Right before I got "Sons of Anarchy," I actually quit acting for 18 months and didn't read a single script, and I wrote a film. I felt like I needed to do something that I had control over, as an artist, and also just do something where I felt like I had some control over my life, as just a human, out in the world.

34. I bought a house, and I've been decorating it.

35. Don't get me wrong. I hang out with my friends, but I basically am very, very driven to work. I read everything that comes through my agent, like ten scripts a week. I'm going to try to negotiate my career with zero compromise and do exactly the work that I want to do. If I can't get that work, then I'm just not going to work. 

36. The truth of the matter is the real industry is in LA and the cream of the talent is there.




37. I find aspects of the industry tedious and hard to manage.

38. There are definitely worse people to be compared with. I think Brad Pitt makes interesting decisions.






39. I grew up obsessed with film and although you know a portion of that was English films, the vast majority of it were the great American filmmakers whose work I would watch over and over.

40. I get invited to literally every single movie premiere that's going on.

41. I always liked the analogy of being an actor is sort of like being a prize fighter, you can live your life the way you want to, but once you know you have a fight coming up, your focus becomes absolutely singular, and you're on task, and you learn as much as you can about your opponent, and you prepare yourself as thoroughly as possible, so that when you step into the ring you have all the tools at your disposal to get the job done. 

42. They say that theater is the actor's medium, television is the writer's medium and film is the director's medium, and it's really true.

43. I love hip hop music, I make hip hop music.

44. I have 60 years to make the money, but the choices I make in the next five years are really going to define my career. 

45. Being at the mercy of the acting profession, in the early days of one's career, is really brutal and feels like you have no control over your life, at all.


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