Sons of Anarchy might have ended almost ten years ago now, but it is still widely regarded as one of television’s most popular series — and for good reason.
As Sons went on, and its popularity grew, it became common for celebrities to have cameos or guest appearances in the episodes, including David Hasselhoff, Ashley Tisdale, Lea Michele, and Marilyn Manson.
And now, in a new podcast, the show’s creator, Kurt Sutter, has revealed two other stars who he originally wanted to cast as major characters.
For context, Kurt created, produced, and wrote the series, while also directing some episodes. He also played incarcerated MC member Otto Delaney, and his wife, Katey Sagal, played one of the show’s main characters — and biggest antagonists — Gemma Teller, Jax’s mom.
One of those questions asked if there were any actors Kurt had wanted on the show but was unable to make work — and somebody immediately came to mind.
The showrunner revealed he originally wanted rapper Dr. Dre to play police officer Eli Roosevelt in the series. Roosevelt joined Sons of Anarchy in the fourth season and played a pretty pivotal role up until his death in the Season 6 finale.
“We actually wanted Dre. I don’t know if we officially made an offer, but we wanted him,” Kurt explained. “We thought it would be cool to have Dre play a cop, for Roosevelt.”
And Kurt went on to reveal that Jimmy Smits’s character, Nero Padilla, was initially an entirely different concept to what ended up on our screens. In fact, the original idea was that the character of Nero would replace Ryan Hurst’s character Opie as Jax’s best friend after Opie’s tragic death in Season 5.
“The initial conceit of the character of Nero was not necessarily as a love interest for Gemma; it was more kind of like an Opie character,” Kurt said. “And I really wanted Jack Huston. I was such a fan of Boardwalk Empire and his character, and he’s such a great actor and a lovely guy. Jack loved the idea, but we just couldn’t make it work. Boardwalk was, you know, in the throws of its success.”
Elsewhere in the podcast, Kurt reflected on how lucky they were to secure Charlie as their leading man because the star was actually focusing on writing when the opportunity arose and wasn’t looking for any acting roles.
“It sounds so cheesy, and it’s Hollywood: ‘That kid’s going to be a star!’ but it was so clear to me when I saw Charlie’s sort of swagger in the first few episodes,” he continued. “Not because of the show; I didn’t know if that character would be any kind of vehicle for him in terms of moving his career forward, but I knew that he just had that thing. And he’s such a sweet boy.”
The actor was just 19 years old when he got his breakout role in the British TV series Queer as Folk in 1999, which has a huge cult following. But other than that, Charlie’s career didn’t really take off until Sons — and he admitted that he was getting “really, really frustrated” over not booking jobs prior to this.
Charlie then said that he was able to secure a couple of days to “obsessively read” the script over and over again before meeting with Kurt, and he was asked to meet with the studio the following day.
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