Charlie Hunnam Says He Only Did Pacific Rim to Work With Guillermo del Toro, Not for the Giant Robot Fights
Sirens blare and beaches empty as officials defend drastic measures—because the shadows surfacing offshore aren’t folklore after all: giant sea monsters.
Charlie Hunnam just said the quiet part out loud: he did Pacific Rim because he wanted to work with Guillermo del Toro, not because he has any particular love for kaiju smackdowns. Honestly, kind of a funny reveal from the face of a giant-monster franchise that did pretty well for itself.
"I thought it was a great opportunity to work with a director that I really like," Hunnam told Variety when asked about Pacific Rim. "I couldn't care less about giant robots fighting giant monsters. I read the script, and I had no emotional experience with it at all."
The movie that worked anyway
Del Toro's Pacific Rim arrived in 2013 and turned into both a critical and commercial win: $410 million worldwide on a $190 million budget. The setup is simple and very loud: humanity vs. Kaiju, fought with towering humanoid mechs called Jaegers.
Hunnam plays Raleigh Becket, a former Jaeger pilot who gets yanked out of retirement for one last, world-saving mission. The cast is stacked: Rinko Kikuchi, Idris Elba, Ron Perlman, and Charlie Day all suit up (metaphorically and sometimes literally).
How it spun into a franchise
- 2018: Pacific Rim: Uprising hit theaters as the live-action sequel.
- 2021–2022: Pacific Rim: The Black ran two seasons on Netflix as an animated follow-up.
- 2024: Netflix announced a prequel series exclusively for the platform.
So yeah, the movie Hunnam felt zero for on the page became a whole ecosystem. Inside baseball angle here: it says a lot about the Del Toro effect when your lead admits he wasn’t emotionally hooked by the script, and the final product still clicks with audiences.
What Hunnam is doing next
He’s heading from fictional monsters to a very real one: Hunnam plays notorious serial killer Ed Gein in the next installment of Ryan Murphy’s Monster anthology at Netflix. Gein, if you need a refresher, helped inspire horror icons like Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story lands on Netflix on October 3.