The One Film With a Lord of the Rings Star That Made Charlie Hunnam Quit Reading Reviews
One movie with Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood convinced Charlie Hunnam to stop reading reviews for good — and he explains why he hasn’t looked back in years.
Charlie Hunnam has a simple rule for staying sane: he does not read reviews anymore. The switch flipped after one movie with Elijah Wood, and he has stuck to it for years.
The moment that changed it
Hunnam says he figured this out early on and never looked back. The trigger was 2005's 'Green Street Hooligans' — the London football-firm drama where he starred opposite 'Lord of the Rings' alum Elijah Wood. That one developed a loyal cult following over time, but the initial critical response stung enough that he decided he was done letting reviews live in his head.
'There was a film I did called Green Street Hooligans, which ended up getting a huge sort of cult following to it, but the critics were not particularly kind to me when that film came out, and I said, 'All right, okay. I don't need to go through this again.''
His stance now is pretty straightforward: he avoids the chatter altogether. As he put it in a quick chat with Access Hollywood, he learned the trick early, and he has been at this for 27 years.
Where he said it (and the side story)
This all came up at the Critics' Choice Awards, where Hunnam was a nominee. He says he actually did not know about the nomination at first. He was up at his ranch north of Santa Barbara, barely checking his phone, when it started blowing up.
He looked down and saw more than 40 missed calls and messages, assumed something terrible had happened, and then realized it was the opposite. In his words: something wonderful, and off to the show he went.
Bottom line: one rough rollout nearly 20 years ago taught Hunnam a career-long lesson — filter out the noise, do the work, and let the audience find you in the long run.