Charlie Hunnam is getting ready for his upcoming role in Guy Ritchie’s movie, Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur . The film is a re-imagining of the classic English legend and will center on a young King Arthur, played by Hunnam.
The movie follows Arthur, who doesn’t know about his royal bloodline and is running a gang in the alleys of Londonium. After discovering Excalibur, Arthur finds himself in a fight against Vortigern (Jude Law), who murdered his parents, with a young Guinevere, played by Astrid Berges-Frisbey.
According to the old stories, Guinevere falls in love with Arthur’s most trusted knight, Lancelot, in one of the oldest love triangles on record. However, it still isn’t clear if Ritchie will follow the old stories in regards to Arthur and Guinevere’s relationship or go in a new direction. Either way, the new movie is only the first in a planned series, so there will be plenty of time to develop all of those complicated relationships and storylines.
Meanwhile, filming of the coming movie is currently underway in Wales. With that in mind, Ritchie posted a few-behind-the-scenes images of the cast and crew on his Instagram account. One of the photos offer a first look at Hunnam as the legendary King Arthur. The picture shows Hunnam on set with Ritchie, who captioned the photo with “First day on KORT .”
Hunnam recently spoke with Men’s Journal and he opened up about being a fan of Ritchie and what the role of King Arthur meant to him.
“I’m thrilled man. I’ve been watching Guy’s movies since he first came on the scene, and I think you could say that the King Arthur story is why I got into acting in the first place… I fell in love with the story and would watch any of the movies about the story that played when I was a kid.”
After playing Jax Teller for seven seasons on Sons of Anarchy, Charlie needed to get used to swinging a sword instead of brandishing a pistol.
“We’re getting right into it. I’m training hard. Luckily I already have a little experience with sword training for Pacific Rim , we had some intense stick fighting scenes that I had to prepare in that one.”
Eric Bana is set to play alongside Hunnam as Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon.
Knights of the Roundtable: King Arthur, the first film in the six film series , is expected to be released in theaters in July, 2016.
[Image Courtesy: Guy Ritchie via Instagram]