LOS ANGELES — His kickstand dragged on the pavement, and his mirror was spinning. Worthless. Even actor Charlie Hunnam, with the little experience he has riding motorcycles, knows a road hazard when he rides one, and the beat-up Harley- Davidson fit the bill.
“This bike’s —” Hunnam trailed off, as he pulled off the road, unstrapped his brain bucket and lit a cigarette.
Hunnam was blurring the line between his fictional role as a motorcycle miscreant on FX’s new outlaw biker drama, “Sons of Anarchy,” and his real life as an actor. He was spending a rare day off from filming to ride the dusty Hollywood hills that double as Charming, Calif., the fictional setting for the show.
And he was riding the only bike the producers would let him borrow — a barely working backup model.
Like many of “Sons of Anarchy’s” fictional club members, Hunnam doesn’t own a motorcycle. He learned to ride for the part. Ron Perlman, who plays the club’s coldhearted leader, has so little experience in the saddle, he says, “that it probably does more harm than good.” But FX has found a loyal following for its new motorcycle show.
“Sons of Anarchy,” which debuted in early September, has been among the most consistent first-year dramas for the 14-year-old network.
Thanks to its steady weekly audience of about 5 million viewers, the Wednesday show was picked up for a second season after just four episodes.
Motorcycles and the outlaws drawn to them have long been fodder in film. But recently they haven’t had much play on TV.
“The stereotype most people have of the subculture is usually one of two things: these furry, fuzzy teddy bears like ‘Wild Hogs,’ or the scumball white trash living in trailers, smoking meth, which is as inaccurate as the other one,” said the show’s creator, Kurt Sutter.
Sutter developed the characters and plots by hanging out with “one of the bigger clubs” in northern California. Which one, he won’t say.
“What was eye-opening to me was the way these guys lived. These sort of normal, middle-class lives. They all have day jobs.”
It was the unexploited and darker elements of this renegade subculture that drove Sutter to create “Sons of Anarchy,” a drama about a gun-running motorcycle club doling out eye-for-an-eye justice in a small California town.
The show’s ensemble cast features Hunnam as a pretty-faced bad boy; Perlman as his tough-as-nails stepfather, and Katey Sagal as the club’s leather-and-lace matriarch.
Sutter says the show is about family, which may explain why it’s attracting female viewers — about 40 percent of its audience is women.
“Generally, the feedback has been positive. I’ll just say that most of the e-mails have a picture attached.”
Sutter was previously an executive producer of the FX hit show “The Shield,” a police-corruption drama that recently wrapped after seven seasons. Not surprisingly, many themes in “Sons of Anarchy,” as well as its architecture (multiple plot lines with an ensemble cast), mirror “The Shield.”
But where the Los Angeles Police Department was the inspiration for “The Shield,” Sutter’s muse was Shakespeare. Specifically, the play “Hamlet,” and the idea of a man in the making.
In “Sons of Anarchy,” the Hamlet character is Jax, played by Hunnam. Jax is a member of the gang by birth; his father founded the group.
But Jax’s dad is now dead, and his stepfather, Clay, played by Perlman, is running things — taking its members to morally questionable places with no regard, respect or remorse for the club’s past principles.
Sagal got her part “because I was sleeping with the boss,” she joked. Best known for her role as the tacky Peg Bundy on “Married With Children,” Sagal is Sutter’s wife.
Both Sutter and Sagal have a real- life history with motorcycles.
“In my wilder days, I rode on the back a lot. That was when I was bold and before I had children,” said Sagal. Sutter rode a Harley for six years before selling it to pay for graduate school. He hasn’t owned a bike in 10 years, he said, but recently went to a showroom to check out a Harley-Davidson VRod.
“You did?” asked Sagal, turning to her husband during a break.
“I told you,” Sutter said.
“There’s no way you’re getting a bike,” she said.
