Charlie Hunnam has spent years playing men who are never caught off guard. Off-screen, he makes no effort to pretend the same is true of himself.
Hunnam is a longtime Brazilian jiu-jitsu student under the renowned Rigan Machado, whose celebrity training program has produced some of the most quietly capable practitioners in Hollywood.
Machado, the man whose hand-picked stunt team helped choreograph the “John Wick” franchise, keeps a tight lid on which famous names walk through his gym doors. But the “Sons of Anarchy” star has earned a specific mention more than once.
“He loves jiu-jitsu more than life. He loves to spar. Another day, one day he arrive here with bruises. I go ‘Charlie Hunnam, take it easy. You get scratched too much,'” Machado once said of his dedicated student.
That kind of commitment to training speaks to a man who takes preparation seriously. But when an actual threat appeared in his own backyard in the early hours of the morning, it was not grappling technique that he reached for.
“I’m a pretty cowardly individual and I panic at the prospect of any physical altercation. I got broken into once at three in the morning by a guy who was literally twice my size,” Hunnam said in an interview.
At the time, he had been running night shoots and was awake late in a small outbuilding separate from the main house, going over lines with his cat settled on his knee. Then both of them heard something move in the backyard. Hunnam knew the cat well enough to read what came next.
“My cat panicked and sort of went into a little commando shuffle out,” he recalled. The animal’s silent, urgent departure told him everything.
“I scurried up to the door and there was this colossus of a human being walking casually through my backyard. And then there was a little machete on my door frame that had been there since I moved in and I’d never moved it. So I grabbed it,” he said.
His wife was asleep inside the single-story house, with only two French doors separating the yard from the interior. With no clear plan and a very large stranger moving toward the property, Hunnam said something shifted. The character he had inhabited across seven seasons of “Sons of Anarchy,” the unflinching Jax Teller, seemed to take over where he himself had no answer.
“We’ve done so much fake combat sequences in my career that I knew how to swing a machete without actually hitting someone. I swiped at him and he fell backwards. I said very calmly, ‘You’ve got 10 seconds to leave or they’re never going to find your body.’ He left immediately,” he recounted.
Looking back on it, Hunnam was direct about where that steadiness had come from.
“That was a manifestation of a character I’d been playing for seven years. I didn’t know how to handle the situation, but he did,” he said.
It is the kind of moment that no amount of drilling or sparring can fully rehearse for, though Machado’s training approach comes close in its own way. The instructor has described his method with celebrity students as deliberately structured.
“I don’t do more than three techniques. And I go to something called super review. You’re going to have to drill each one a number of times. You have to do a mix of blending techniques, one, two, three.”
He rounds out the sessions with physical conditioning, adding: “A lot of stretch, a lot of cardio. Sometimes I bring a team of professionals to do the stretch and do the cardio.”
Machado has placed Hunnam alongside fellow Hollywood actor Joel Kinnaman as two of his most valued students.
