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Press Archive > Magazine Articles > Detroit News - September |
| 'Undeclared' star seeks head-of-the-class status Charlie Hunnam plays a smooth-talking, ladies' man in the new college comedy, "Undeclared." Undeclared actor Charlie Hunnam isn't ashamed of his past, but he's ready to let go of it. Two years ago in his native England, he caused a scandal by playing a 15-year-old homosexual who had a tryst with a man double his age on the series Queer as Folk. Conservative social groups and the press lashed out at Hunnam and the show. After two years of dealing with the questions, Hunnam, 21, does not shy away from the press when the show is brought up. He defends the storyline and acknowledges, as an aside, that he is not gay (in fact, he and his wife are very happy). He is surprised the American press asks him about it since the British version of Folk has not aired here on network or basic cable. "I was 18 and got thrown into this whole mad thing," he says of Folk. "I auditioned for it 10 times. Prior to that, I didn't do anything of any substance. I had read the scripts so I knew what I was getting into. "I was expecting a ... storm. Why did I do it? Because it was a great script with a great director." The resulting controversy made Hunnam a celebrity at home. "It got really bad if I sat there everyday and read the papers," he says during a press confererence in Pasadena. "I was at home with my friends, chilling out and trying to ignore it." Now, he's preparing for stardom in the United States, playing Lloyd, a very straight theater major and resident heartthrob on Undeclared, which premieres at 8:30 p.m. Tuesday on Fox. Hunnam exhibits a sarcastic sense of humor during an interview at a Fox network party. He admits he's insecure and says he tries to live now just as he did before he made it as an actor. "I'm 21," he says. "What do I need to be secure about? I live the way I always have, eating beans and wieners every night. I save my money. I'm an actor, and I have only been acting for three years. "I'm not very good as far as acting goes. I'm starting right now, and I want to be ... great. Acting is my life. So like everything else in my life, I want to be good at it." As Lloyd on Undeclared, Hunnam is playing a guy very different from the man who portrays him. Lloyd is a wiseacre, but he's also a ladies' man, with smooth style and a hip British accent. The women love him. His style is charming and seemingly effortless. Undeclared creator Judd Apatow zeroed in on Hunnam's sense of humor at the actor's audition. "He was hilarious," Apatow told reporters. "At the time, I hadn't written the pilot. We did something weird here, which is I had this idea that I would do a show about college. And when you go to college, you get thrown together with all these strangers, and I thought, 'What if I write it after I cast it?' "... So I wrote up a bunch of generic scenes and had different people read together and hired the strongest people from that, and Charlie was certainly one of them. ... He was just funnier than the other people." Moving to the States was an adjustment in more ways than one. In England, Hunnam was a star, but here he was a nobody. "I did Queer as Folk in England and then decided to come out here and try my luck, and no one would hire me for a year and a half and then Judd did," Hunnam says. "I couldn't believe it," Apatow says. "I'm like, how come he's not working? There's a mistake here." Playing the roommate to dorky Steven, Hunnam's the guy that shows the awkward American the rites of passage: How to fight, how to talk to women, how to be cool. With loud dance music blaring in the background, Hunnam -- who loves movies but does not watch television -- raises his voice when he announces his future goals. "I want to ... rule the world," he says. "I want to be the next Tom Cruise." ~ Terry Morrow |