Charlie's angle

Charlie Hunnam believes he's proved that he's serious about acting. The evidence, as far as he's concerned, is that he's only worked five weeks in the past three-and-a-half years.

"I'm not going to do anything that I'm not 100 per cent excited about," says the Newcastle-born actor, who appeared in the BBC1 children's soap Byker Grove as a youngster before making a name for himself in provocative TV drama Queer As Folk.

Then he headed for America when he was barely 18, appearing in the TV series Undeclared and taking his first Hollywood lead, as the psychotic ex-boyfriend of soon-to-be-Mrs Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, in the movie thriller Abandon.

The title role in a star-studded, US-made new movie version of Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby followed. But he hasn't been on screen since a supporting role in Anthony Mingella's drama Cold Mountain, released two years ago, although he received much exposure as the face of a worldwide Emporio Armani campaign last summer.

"It got to the point last year where I had to make some money or sell my house. I was fortunate to do a modelling job that my pride would ordinarily prevent me from doing," he explains.

"It kept me going for a while. I live fairly frugally. I'm not going to say I live on rice and beans, but frugal for the industry I'm in.

"I'd got into the habit of taking the work I could get and I was incredibly fortunate in the beginning of my career. But I reached a point where I learnt I wasn't doing the work I wanted to do."

He calls this rather grandly "zero compromise policy", accepting that, inevitably, there will be huge periods of unemployment. "That's very frustrating and difficult to deal with, but I have to feel the film is important and have a lot of respect for it."

More frustrating than not acting is the tendency of others to make films purely to make money. He saw modelling for Armani as less of an evil than making a movie in which he didn't believe.

Hunnam is back in the spotlight in a movie destined to stir up as many emotions as Queer As Folk, in which he played schoolboy Nathan, exploring his sexuality and underage gay sex.

Green Street - formerly called Hooligans - is a tough, expletive-filled drama centred on a West Ham football firm and their violent, away-from-the-pitch activities. Hunnam's Pete leads a hardcore group of West Ham United supporters known as the Green Street Elite, who welcome an American student (played by Elijah Wood, Hobbit Frodo in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy) into their ranks.

"I hadn't worked for a while and was looking for a serious film-maker who wanted to make a serious film," Hunnam says. "It was a point in my career where I didn't have the juice to go and work with the very established directors. I'd been looking to find the next generation of film-makers and the opportunity to work on their first projects."

He found what he was looking for in German-born director Lexi Alexander, who'd been in a football firm in her homeland. He liked both her and the script, resulting in "the best hands-down acting experience I've had so far".

He began preparing for the role months before the cameras started rolling. His name didn't mean anything to the financiers, so there was a wait until the bankable Wood signed up.

"Normally, you go on set and, for the first two or three weeks, still have questions and are trying to figure things out. Here, all the work was done before I got there," he says. "We only had five weeks filming which was mad but not without its positive side because it brings its own energy with it, which is incredible and I think translates strongly to the screen."

Alexander cast Hunnam after seeing him in Nicholas Nickleby, which he frankly finds incredible as it's such a different role. "I have a lot of problems with that film and particularly my performance. That film was the final straw. Doing that and then Cold Mountain was a polar opposite experience and exactly the type of work I want to do," he says.

Playing a soccer hooligan was a stretch, not least because he'd never been to a football match in his life, reckoning that American Wood knew more about the game than he did. Hunnam's attitude was simple: "If I had 90 minutes to spend, I would watch a movie."

Leo Gregory, who plays his longtime friend in Green Street, stayed with him in LA for three weeks in a bonding session. Back in this country, Gregory took him to his first match to see Newcastle play Tottenham. Hunnam wasn't converted to the beautiful game. "I wasn't compelled by the game but overwhelmed by the human element. I was absolutely electrified by the experience," he says.

The emotional enthusiasm of the crowd is much the same feeling he gets from acting, or "being alive and in the moment" as he puts it. "That's what acting gives me. Most of the time people are involved in the economic and social strains of life. People busy themselves with the tedious minutiae of life and not living."

He first became aware of this growing up, as an audience member finding escapism in films. "I found myself as a lad wanting to live so much in the world I was viewing and to provide that experience for someone else," he says.

If this makes Hunnam sound serious, if not pretentious, that's the wrong impression. His easy charm and relaxed manner make him very likeable. Clearly, he's prepared to suffer for his art by only working on a project in which he has total faith.

A nomadic lifestyle growing up, moving from Newcastle to the Lake District and from house to house, influenced his outlook. "I didn't grow up very wealthy, but relatively poor. My mum managed to put food on the table but sometimes there wasn't anything else so I'd always work," he recalls.

"From the age of two to 12, my brother and I were a very tight unit, and my mum wanted to be available to us and the only way she could do that was to buy and sell properties. We moved every six to nine months, a gipsy lifestyle which is probably why I adapted to the actors' lifestyle."

After completing Queer As Folk, he headed for the US. "I found myself at a loose end and had some money in my pocket," he says. "I didn't want to go back to Newcastle because there was nothing there for me in terms of what I wanted to do professionally. I didn't want to go to London and had felt an affinity to America. So I thought I'd try my chances."

He's been there seven years. He doesn't want to stay in LA forever and hates the prospect of raising children there, but loves it for the present and feels fortunate to spend his 20s there "because it's a great place for a young man to live".

When he's not working, he plays poker. Not celebrity poker but "proper poker". He plays on the Internet every day, has home games and competes in casino tournaments. "I subsidise my income playing 40 or 50 hours a week. I make enough so that I don't have to go to the cash machine for a couple of weeks at a time."

Despite the financial difficulties, he has no intention of working just for the sake of it. He can afford to live for another eight months. After that, if he hasn't found suitable acting work, he'll have to sell his house.

His aim on returning to LA after promotional duties for Green Street is "just to keep on keeping on". He reads 90 per cent of the film scripts that go through the agency he's with and hopes to find a project that interests him. "I hope it's something and I hope it's soon," he says.

* Green Street (18) opens in cinemas on September 9.