‘I regret almost all of it’: meet the gun-toting hippie behind Shantaram
13.10.2022 - 15:09
/ msn.com
the British actor Charlie Hunnam, best known as Jax in the crime drama Sons of Anarchy. When the rights were originally sold to Warner Brothers in 2004, following a $2m bidding war, Roberts’s protagonist, Lin, was to be played by Johnny Depp, who the author personally chose because of Depp’s love of the book. (The pair remain friends.
)But Hunnam is a more-than-adequate replacement. Not only does the actor resemble Roberts in looks – the pair were mistaken for father and son when Hunnam visited Jamaica ahead of filming – he possesses a similar otherworldliness, too. “He’s a profoundly spiritual young man,” says the writer.
Roberts was particularly impressed that Hunnam takes fortnight-long trips into the wilderness, setting up camp and living off his own supplies. Hunnam, like Roberts, also has a penchant for meditation and ruminating about philosophy. Recalling his trip to Jamaica, he says, “[We] slept about two hours a night, and [Roberts] talked for 22 hours a day.
It was like a semester at university over the course of four days. With a lot of marijuana. So unfortunately, I don’t remember all of it.
But what I do remember was pretty spectacular. Or so I thought at the time. ”Roberts also looks back on the encounter fondly, and he wishes he had been more like Hunnam when he was his age.
The younger man is “a role model at this point… I was more of a parole model. ”Roberts was in his mid-20s, living with his childhood sweetheart (whom he had wed on his 18th birthday) and their daughter, and embarking on a career in academia at home in Australia when his marriage broke down in 1976. He lost custody and, spiralling, was introduced by a friend to heroin.