Charlie Hunnam

Charlie Hunnam (born April 10, 1980, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, England) is an English actor known for playing alpha male roles, notably Jackson (“Jax”) Teller, a leader of a violent motorcycle gang, in the popular FX crime drama Sons of Anarchy (2008–14). In 2025 Hunnam portrayed the infamous real-life serial killer Ed Gein in the third season of the Netflix anthology series Monster.

Early years

Hunnam’s parents divorced when he was a toddler, and he was raised mostly by his mother, who owned a small business. His father worked as a bouncer and dockworker and later became a scrap metal merchant. Hunnam has said that he used his father as a model when portraying the tough, hypermasculine characters he became known for in his acting career. When he was 12 years old, he moved with his mother from the cosmopolitan city of Newcastle to a small town in Cumbria, in northwestern England. He struggled with making friends in his new environment, getting into frequent fights, but took consolation in the beautiful nature of the nearby Lake District. In a 2022 New York Times interview, Hunnam described his teenage years in Cumbria as “an absolute crucible of violence and isolation. But I had this extraordinary natural wonder literally on my doorstep. I took to the mountains, walking and planning what my life was going to be when I was old enough to live it on my own terms.”

Hunnam became interested in a film career through his love of British director John Boorman’s Arthurian epic film Excalibur (1981). He got his first professional acting gig when, at age 17, he was spotted while shopping by a production manager for the BBC teen drama Byker Grove; he appeared in one episode in 1998. He then found work on several other series before getting his first widespread notice with a role on the pioneering LGBTQ comedic drama Queer as Folk (1999–2000). Hunnam played Nathan Maloney, a 15-year-old coming of age in the gay community of Manchester, England. Meanwhile, Hunnam studied acting and film at the Cumbria College of Art and Design in Carlisle, England (now part of the University of Cumbria).

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Budding career in Hollywood

About 2000 Hunnam moved to Los Angeles and began working steadily in U.S. film and television. He portrayed Lloyd Haythe, a suave theater major, in the college comedy Undeclared (2001–02), created by Judd Apatow. He was also cast in several movies, including as the title character in Nicholas Nickleby (2002); the unsettling Bosie, who murders Confederate deserters during the American Civil War, in Cold Mountain (2003); Pete Dunham, a violent football (soccer) fan, in Green Street Hooligans (2005); and Patric, a ruthless militia member, in Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian thriller Children of Men (2006).

Sons of Anarchy

Hunnam’s most distinctive role so far has been as Teller in Sons of Anarchy, which aired from 2008 to 2014 and follows the tumultuous activities of a California chapter of a biker gang resembling the Hells Angels. Teller is the conflicted son of the founder of the club, which—echoing the fraught family dynamics of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet—has been run by his stepfather and his mother since his father’s death. Throughout the show, Teller wrestles with becoming the gang’s leader or leaving the life entirely.

Hunnam claimed that he never got into a car during the show’s run and instead traveled only by motorcycle. He became so immersed in portraying Teller that leaving the role behind when the show ended proved difficult. In a 2016 interview with GQ, Hunnam recalled that saying goodbye “really felt like a genuine bereavement, because he was this guy that I loved and hung out with constantly for seven years. It was a lot of tears for, like, two or three weeks, every time I thought about it. Then one day, I woke up and was like, ‘Okay, it’s time to move on. RIP, Jax Teller.’ ”

Later roles

Hunnam occasionally took on other roles during the run of Sons of Anarchy, including in Guillermo del Toro’s action-adventure Pacific Rim (2013). In September 2013 Universal Studios announced that he had been cast as Christian Grey in the hotly anticipated film version of E.L. James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey (2011). A month later, however, he opted out of the role because of conflicts with his shooting schedule for Sons of Anarchy and the supernatural horror film Crimson Peak (2015), another collaboration with del Toro. In the media frenzy around the production of Fifty Shades of Grey, which was eventually released in 2015, Hunnam’s casting had been criticized by some fans. He later called what happened “the worst professional experience of my life.”

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After the conclusion of Sons of Anarchy, Hunnam mostly pursued film work. In 2016 he starred as British explorer Percy Fawcett in the action-adventure The Lost City of Z and the following year played the legendary British sovereign in Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and a man wrongfully convicted of murder in Papillon. He subsequently had roles in A Million Little Pieces (2018), Triple Frontier (2019), Jungleland (2019), The Gentlemen (2019), Last Looks (2021), and Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon: Part One—A Child of Fire (2023).

In 2022 Hunnam returned to the small screen with the Apple TV+ series Shantaram (2022), about an Australian prison escapee who seeks refuge in the criminal underworld of Mumbai in the 1980s. In October 2025 he starred as serial killer Ed Gein in Monster. Previous seasons of the show, created by true-crime impresarios Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, focused on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers. Hunnam later appeared in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story (2026); he portrayed Borden’s father, who was brutally murdered in 1892.

(Read more about the notorious serial killer in How Many People Did Ed Gein Kill?)

Personal life

In 1999, when he was 18, Hunnam married Katharine Towne, an actress and the daughter of famed Hollywood screenwriter Robert Towne. The couple had met only three weeks before their wedding, which took place at a chapel on the Las Vegas Strip. They divorced three years later. Hunnam has been in a relationship with jewelry designer Morgana McNelis since the mid-2000s.