Dakota Johnson Reveals Which A-Lister She Teased for Walking Away from Fifty Shades of Grey

Charlie Hunnam is still fielding questions about the one that got away: Fifty Shades of Grey. He bumped into Dakota Johnson recently, got a little friendly ribbing about bailing on the movie, and says he has zero regrets. The guy is 45 now, busy headlining Monster: The Ed Gein Story, and still standing by the choice he made a decade ago.

The latest from Hunnam

In a recent chat tied to his new Ed Gein project, the Sons of Anarchy and Shantaram actor ended up revisiting the Fifty Shades saga. He says he ran into Dakota Johnson not long ago and she gave him a good-natured hard time about walking away from Christian Grey. He also admitted he never watched the movies and, looking back, thinks he was not exactly in the clearest headspace when he first agreed to do them.

"I never looked back... No regrets at all."

How it went down

• 2013: Hunnam was announced as Christian Grey but bowed out because of scheduling conflicts. Jamie Dornan stepped in and has been the face of the role ever since.
• A while later, Hunnam explained he had already promised himself to Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak well over a year earlier. People told him he was crazy to stick with that since del Toro still had about four months to recast, which could have freed Hunnam up for Fifty Shades. He passed anyway, out of loyalty to del Toro.
• He personally called Fifty Shades director Sam Taylor-Johnson to break the news. According to Hunnam, that call turned emotional fast — they both cried for roughly 20 minutes.
• About ten years ago, he told V Man that the whole exit was the worst professional experience of his career and emotionally brutal. Heartbreaking, in his words.
• Last year, he joked to TMZ that the only real regret is financial — he would have been richer if he had stuck around. At that point he still had not watched the film but said he wanted to.

The inside-baseball part

Actors talk about 'scheduling conflicts' all the time, but this one is pretty transparent: he chose a promise to a director he respects over a massive pop-culture juggernaut. That 20-minute cry with the first film's director is a wild little detail, and the fact that he still has not watched the movies makes his 'no regrets' stance feel even more definitive. Dakota giving him a playful hard time just adds to the mythology of one of the stranger near-misses in recent casting history.