‘Shantaram’ Premiere Date and Charlie Hunnam’s Supporting Cast
Charlie Hunnam has been AWOL on the small screen since his six-year stint on Sons of Anarchy. He’s mostly focused his talents on movies that have received critical acclaim. The actor has returned to TV with an Apple TV+ production, Shantaram. Learn when the series premieres and Hunnam’s supporting cast.
‘Shantaram’ spent time in development hell
Shantaram is an upcoming thriller based on the 2003 Gregory David Roberts novel of the same name. In the book, Roberts draws inspiration from his own life and narrates a story about a bank robber and heroin addict from Australia, Lin Ford, who escapes a maximum security prison in the country. He moves to India, where he reinvents himself as a doctor in the vibrant and chaotic slums of Bombay in the ’80s.
Lin gets entangled with a local mafia boss but uses his counterfeiting and gun-running skills to fight the Russian troops invading Afghanistan. Meanwhile, he falls in love with an intriguing and enigmatic woman named Karla. Lin finds himself in the dilemma of choosing between freedom or love and all its complications.
Shantaram has a history that’s almost as old as the book itself. The project caught the attention of several Hollywood execs in the early 2000s. Those involved wanted to make Shantaram into a film for over a decade. Warner Bros. tapped Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp and his sister Christi Dembroski to produce the movie, partnering with Graham King of GK Films.
Aside from producing the project, Depp was to be its star, while Peter Weir would direct him. Warner Bros. paid $2 million for the project’s rights in 2004 after a series of stalled attempts to get the movie on its feet. Ultimately, the movie got derailed by the Writer’s Guild strike.
The controversial star took the initiative to jump-start the process again in 2013, courting Joel Edgerton for the lead role, but that never came to fruition. The project was shelved until it landed at Apple as a series.
‘Shantaram’ premieres in October 2022, with Charlie Hunnam and a relatively unknown supporting cast
Apple recently dropped the first photo look of the series starring Sons of Anarchy star Hunnam on a motorcycle. According to Deadline, Shantaram is scheduled for an October 14, 2022 premiere. The outlet reports that the streamer will release the show’s first three episodes on October 14, then drop new episodes weekly every Friday until December 16 on the platform. The series will contain 12 episodes in its first season.
Hunnam stars as the lead, Lin Ford. Antonia Desplat joins Hunnam as his character’s love interest Karla. Richard Roxburgh co-stars as Detective Sergeant Marty Nightingale, while Radhika Apte appears as Kavita. Syriana’s Alexander Siddig appears as Khader Khan, while Mel Odedra stars as Walid Shah.
David Field and Fayssal Bazzi appear as Wally Nightingale and Abdullah Taheri, respectively. Other cast members include Shubham Saraf, Elektra Kilbey, Luke Pasqualino, Alyy Khan, Sujaya Dasgupta, and Vincent Perez.
The show finally premieres after filming interruptions
In 2018, Paramount Television Studios and Anonymous Creations bought the rights to Shantaram, planning to make it into a series. In mid-2018, news broke that Apple Inc. was developing a TV adaptation of Roberts’ novel with Eric Warren Singer as its screenwriter.
Singer took over a year to finish writing the script, while pre-production work finished in August 2019. Filming of the drama began in October 2019 in Australia and then moved to India a month later. In 2020, production was halted due to the Indian monsoon season and COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.
Singer also dropped out when production stopped arguing that the delay would interfere with other projects on the pipeline. Production on Shantaram resumed in 2021 in Melbourne, Australia, with principal photography completed in mid-December 2021.
