Charlie Hunnam got his acting start on a British series titled Byker Grove in the late 1990s after getting discovered on Christmas Eve in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he grew up.
Hunnam recalled “dancing around” a store while trying on sneakers for his brother’s gift when “this lady was looking at me,” he told Variety in an October 2025 interview.
“So I blew her a kiss, just being the cheeky young man that I was,” he added. “It turned out that her name was Elizabeth Binns and she was the production manager for Byker Grove.”
Hunnam appeared in other projects — like Queer as Folki Undeclared and Green Street Hooligans — before nabbing the role of biker king Jax Teller in Sons of Anarchy, which he played from 2008 to 2014.
“I would look back at those early episodes and think I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I didn’t have a very developed skill set,” Hunnam told Variety in a September 2025 cover story. “I feel really proud of seasons 6 and 7, as though my work had finally caught up to the level of my aspiration.”
While he kept acting after saying goodbye to Jax, the British star became a household name once again when season 3 of Netflix’s Monsters premiered in October 2025 with Hunnam as serial killer Ed Gein.
Keep scrolling to see Hunnam’s transformation over the years:
