Charlie Hunnam calls it the "Geordie walk."
The English actor's Pacific Rim character Raleigh Becket has a certain confident gait when getting ready to take a giant robot Jaeger into war against futuristic monster Kaiju.
And that character shares it with Hunnam's chronically troubled biker-club president Jax Teller on FX's Sons of Anarchy.
The walk isn't a trait of those roles, though — it's a part of Hunnam's strong personality born out of being from a working-class, rough-and-tumble hometown.
"People from Newcastle are called Geordies, and where I grew up was a battleground," says Hunnam, 33. "If you couldn't fight, you were dead. The walk was almost like the warning — an attempt to project 'You fight me, it's going to be all bad for you.' ''
A serious tone turns lighthearted with a laugh. "I've been swaggering since I was 14 years old!"
Pacific Rim (opening wide Friday) takes Hunnam from the small screen of cable dramas to Hollywood leading man as the central character in Guillermo del Toro's sci-fi monster mash of attacking sea creatures from another dimension and the mechanical weapons that mankind has built to stop them.
Kaiju are just one of Raleigh's problems, though. Some years after his brother is killed in a Kaiju attack, the Jaeger pilot gets his groove back and a rookie co-pilot (Rinko Kikuchi) to take the Gipsy Danger robot back onto the global battlefield.
"If the audience is engaged in the story, it can only be through the character of Raleigh because he's the hero, he's the guy who transcends his own limitations and steps up when no one else has the tools," says Ron Perlman, Hunnam's co-star in Pacific Rim and on Sons of Anarchy. "With Charlie, you're going to get a guy who'll give you the look and dedication and skill set you need to pull that off."
The English actor's Pacific Rim character Raleigh Becket has a certain confident gait when getting ready to take a giant robot Jaeger into war against futuristic monster Kaiju.
And that character shares it with Hunnam's chronically troubled biker-club president Jax Teller on FX's Sons of Anarchy.
The walk isn't a trait of those roles, though — it's a part of Hunnam's strong personality born out of being from a working-class, rough-and-tumble hometown.
"People from Newcastle are called Geordies, and where I grew up was a battleground," says Hunnam, 33. "If you couldn't fight, you were dead. The walk was almost like the warning — an attempt to project 'You fight me, it's going to be all bad for you.' ''
A serious tone turns lighthearted with a laugh. "I've been swaggering since I was 14 years old!"
Pacific Rim (opening wide Friday) takes Hunnam from the small screen of cable dramas to Hollywood leading man as the central character in Guillermo del Toro's sci-fi monster mash of attacking sea creatures from another dimension and the mechanical weapons that mankind has built to stop them.
Kaiju are just one of Raleigh's problems, though. Some years after his brother is killed in a Kaiju attack, the Jaeger pilot gets his groove back and a rookie co-pilot (Rinko Kikuchi) to take the Gipsy Danger robot back onto the global battlefield.
"If the audience is engaged in the story, it can only be through the character of Raleigh because he's the hero, he's the guy who transcends his own limitations and steps up when no one else has the tools," says Ron Perlman, Hunnam's co-star in Pacific Rim and on Sons of Anarchy. "With Charlie, you're going to get a guy who'll give you the look and dedication and skill set you need to pull that off."
