Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam once suffered a severe back injury, describing it as “completely exploded,” while preparing for a role.
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In a 2022 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hunnam shared that he wasn’t feeling his best while attending the red carpet premiere for his Apple TV+ series Shantaram. The event took place shortly after he wrapped filming on the Netflix sci-fi movie Rebel Moon, during which he suffered a major back injury.
Hunnam detailed his injuries: “I have a totally exploded S1 and S2 that are torn wide open, a hundred percent dehydrated.” These injuries affect his hips, groin (S1), and the back of his thighs (S2). The Pacific Rim star added, “It’s going to take two years to heal, and I have a 40 percent tear on the ligament on the right side that holds my spinal column in place.”
Charlie Hunnam Called His Back Injury “Nobody’s Fault”
“It was through nobody’s fault,” he explained about his back injury. “I was training really hard for some big physical requirements that I had to do, but I had lost a lot of weight and not really been training for a few years during COVID.”
The actor admitted that training so hard for his Rebel Moon role contributed to his health setback. Plus, he had just gotten over a laundry list of issues from his previous role in Shantaram (“a bacterial gut infection, a viral gut infection, an acute respiratory infection,” to name a few).
“So then, really getting back to an aggressive regimen while not listening to my body or giving myself enough time to rest and trying to get as big as I could as quickly as I could, ended up just destroying my back.”
Despite the severity of his injuries, Hunnam maintained a positive outlook.
“The show must go on,” he insisted to THR at the time. “I am getting to a point where I’m less tolerant of getting injured and more eager to try and figure out ways to avoid that and mitigate that moving forward. But the intrepid nature of these experiences go hand in hand with the stories that I’m drawn to, so it kind of goes with the territory.”
Fans wanting to see why Hunnam suffered for his art can catch Shantaram on Apple TV+ and Rebel Moon on Netflix.