Charlie Hunnam has revealed that he quit Fifty Shades after suffering a breakdown due to work pressures.
The Sons Of Anarchy star has been due to take on the role of Christian Grey in the movie adaptation of E.L. James’ book but Jamie Dornan was cast after Hunnam quit the project last October.
In a new interview with Moviefone, the 34-year-old revealed that the pressure of taking on such a high-profile film, alongside SOA and Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak proved too much and led to him suffering from a breakdown.
“I wouldn’t have signed up in the first place if I didn’t want to do it. It was a really, really difficult time in my life. 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,” he explained.
“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 [Guillermo Del Toro’s 2015 film] in Toronto. I just had like… frankly, something of a nervous breakdown. I just said, ‘I can’t… I can’t’.”
It had been claimed that the actor had left the project after requesting more script approval, with reports saying that “his heart wasn’t really in it” but Hunnam hit back saying he was “really, really sorry to do it”.
“To fail on such a grand scale – because 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 (his Sons of Anarchy character) 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.”
