“Sons Of Anarchy” Creator Kurt Sutter Just Revealed That He Originally Wanted Dr. Dre To Play A Pretty Prominent Character In The Show

If you didn’t know, the show premiered in 2008 and stars British actor Charlie Hunnam as Jax Teller, a biker struggling to balance being a good person with being part of a legacy motorbike gang. 

It was hugely successful, and by the time the show ended in 2014, it was averaging more than 4 million viewers a week. 

The two recently launched a new podcast called PIE with Kurt Sutter and Katey Sagal, and in Tuesday’s episode, they answered fan questions that had been submitted to the Sons of Anarchy subreddit. 

While Dr. Dre is best known for his music career, he has some acting experience and has appeared in films such as Set It Off and Training Day.

The role of Roosevelt ultimately ended up going to Rockmond Dunbar.

Instead, Nero became more of a father-like figure to Jax after striking up a relationship with his mom.

“As it usually happens, and for the right reasons, the need for the character changed over the course of the season, and he ultimately became more of an OG, and there was the opportunity to have him make more of an impact with him as a father figure, and make him a part of Gemma’s world,” Kurt continued. “And that was clearly the more powerful choice, and more original choice, and then getting Jimmy Smits was just, you know, [chef’s kiss].”

“Finding a leading man, or a leading woman, is always a challenge because you are serving many ministers in terms of network and studio and demographic,” Kurt began. “There are so many people that have an agenda in that decision for different reasons, and, of course, my reasons lean into who’s best for the character.”

“We looked at a lot of dudes and some really amazing actors; none of them really checked the box for me,” he continued. “I forget how Charlie’s name came into the mix, but I remember watching Green Street Hooligans and seeing Charlie, and there was charisma, a beauty about him that was wholly masculine, yet the fragility was right there, and I was like: ‘That’s our fucking guy, how do we get him?’”

“I didn’t know where he was, I didn’t know if he was living in London, I knew nothing about where he was, his availability, and we tracked him down, and he was in Los Angeles, and he was primarily writing at that point and had no interest in doing television,” Kurt said. “Luckily, he picked [the script] up and gave it a read and liked the writing, and we had a chat, and then he checked the boxes for everybody.”

“He’s so sweet,” Katey agreed before saying of Charlie and Kurt: “They fell in love, they really did, it’s a good bromance.”

Charlie previously shared his take on how he landed the role of Jax on his Sons of Anarchy costars Theo Rossi and Kim Coates’s podcast, Reaper Reviews, where he revealed that he very nearly missed out on the role.

“I had gotten close to getting a couple of big jobs and being a director’s choice, but then the studios didn’t feel like I was big enough name recognition to bank whatever budget it was on my back, and so I got really, really frustrated,” Charlie recalled in the 2022 podcast episode. “I was really serious about trying to pursue writing. I think I literally had, like, call it nine months of money before I was going to have to sell my house, and everything was going to go wrong, so I took six months of that and wrote a script.”

“By the grace of god, I ended up selling it, and then was feeling great and had this sort of moment of transition where I was starting to get taken seriously,” he continued. “I had basically four months of scripts neglected, sitting on my desk, and I thought: ‘Let me see how I feel, I’ll read a couple,’ and Sons of Anarchy had just come in, and it was the thinnest because it was the only TV script.”

“I just sort of felt like I desperately want to do this, and I had an intuition of the promise that that experience held,” Charlie explained. “I transitioned immediately from not knowing if I want to go back to acting to I have to get this.”

Echoing what Kurt said, Charlie added: “Kurt had seen Green Street Hooligans and had me as a sort of general idea in the back of his mind when he started writing, then by the time he was casting six months later, he had kind of forgotten that. They went through a couple of rounds of reading people, but he wasn’t finding what he wanted and had a moment like: ‘Ah, what about that kid from that movie, I was thinking about him to begin with.’ And so he had asked me, two or three weeks had gone by when I was trying to finish the script and saying: ‘Listen, I’m not doing anything until I finish this thing…,’ so I knew I had a very, very small amount of time to get myself back in the game on this.”

However, disaster very nearly struck when Charlie accidentally went to the wrong location for his studio audition. Charlie hadn’t realized that the company he was familiar with had recently relocated, and despite arriving at the original building 20 minutes early, he ended up being almost 90 minutes late to the correct location.

“Going into the right place and they were all a little impatient, I walked into a little bit of a brittle room,” he admitted, but thankfully, the tension eased as he read the scene, and he was officially offered the role of Jax there and then. 

The rest, as they say, is history, with Charlie’s profile skyrocketing off the back of Sons.


The star was even cast as Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades of Grey movie franchise before he decided to drop out of the project. 

Charlie has since had leading roles in films such as The Gentlemen, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and Papillon.