Charlie Hunnam has blamed the "rapid" turnaround for 'Pacific Rim: Uprising' as the reason for his character not being in the movie.
Charlie Hunnam
The 37-year-old actor starred as the lead character Raleigh Beckett in 'Pacific Rim', and says the reason he couldn't reprise his role in the upcoming sequel was because Legendary Entertainment - the studio that made the movie and was subsequently bought by Chinese company Wanda - wanted to make the movie "very rapidly", when the star was already committed to upcoming prison movie 'Papillon'.
He said: "There was a huge scheduling conflict. I was already really, really invested in doing 'Papillion'.
"What happened was Legendary was sold to Wanda, which is the big Chinese corporation, and 'Pacific Rim', although it underperformed in other territories in the world, was an enormous success in China. All of a sudden, it became their primary focus to make this and they wanted to do it very, very rapidly ... I think their schedule subsequently changed, and I might have been able to do both, but at that time, they were writing the script and they needed to know, was I in or was I out?"
Despite the scheduling crisis, Charlie insists there's no bad blood between himself and the team at Legendary, and has thanked them for letting him out of his contract so he could focus on 'Papillon'.
He added to DenofGeek.com: "I have great relationships with everyone at Legendary, and they were incredibly generous to me and let me out of my contract.
"I had to do the film whether I liked it or not. When I spoke to (former Legendary chairman) Thomas Tull, who is a dear friend of mine, I said, 'Listen, man. It's not that my heart is not in this. I'm invested in this creatively, but my heart's going to be broken because I already was going to do this other film.'
"He was like, 'Dude, you were going to do that other film and that's where your heart is. I don't want you being on set if you're not going to be happy, so go do the other film,' which was ludicrously generous of him. But that's just the type of man he is."
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