The Lost City of Z was always going to be a troubled production, I think. Brad Pitt and his production company Plan B were working for years to put the film together, and Brad was supposed to star at one point. At another point, Benedict Cumberbatch was cast but he eventually dropped out as the production start date kept changing. Finally, the cast was set: Robert Pattinson and Charlie Hunnam. They filmed in Colombia in 2015 for months on end. Pattinson lost a lot of weight and grew a sadness beard. And what happened with Charlie Hunnam? Well, he basically lost contact with his girlfriend Morgana for five months. Charlie told the story to Entertainment Weekly and he made it sound like he did it to be so “Method Actor.” Blah.

When Charlie Hunnam agreed to play 19th-century explorer Percy Fawcett — opposite Robert Pattinson as fellow traveler Henry Costin — in the film adaptation of David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, he knew it wouldn’t be easy. Giving Hunnam only five days between filming on King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Lost City of Z, the five-month shoot took him away from longtime girlfriend with essentially no means of contact. The solution? A letter a day — or that’s what Hunnam promised, anyway.

“We went to Colombia, and the mail system doesn’t really work very well,” Hunnam said. “It’s completely unreliable. I received a letter from her, and I realized that from the tone of it and things she was saying that she hadn’t received the two letters that I sent before.”

With timely letters not really in the cards, Hunnam decided to go even more Method in portraying the explorer-cum-absentee father Fawcett. He stopped writing altogether. “Which obviously makes me sound like a total bastard, appropriately so,” Hunnam said. “But I was very apologetic.” The separation, however, helped Hunnam understand Percival Fawcett’s obsession. “One of the things that [director James Gray] and I felt strongly that we wanted to explore in the film,” Hunnam said, “was the conflict between family life and the exterior demands that are made on us and the social and economic demands that we all need to deal with in life, being balanced or in conflict with the internal drive, to be the people we want to be and achieve the things that we want to achieve.”

But where does that leave things with Hunnam and the girlfriend he promised to write to? Well, while Colombian mail system failed him, the jewel market did not.

“I had the benefit of shooting in Colombia, where they have rather lovely and somewhat cheap emeralds,” Hunnam says. “My girlfriend is a jewelry designer, so I was able to come back with an appropriately sized gift. It didn’t remedy all of the trouble I was in, but it got me halfway there.”

[From EW]

If you were dating an actor and he dropped off the face of the earth for five months without calling, writing, emailing, telegramming or anything else, wouldn’t you just assume you had been dumped? Like, that sounds like he was ghosting Morgana. And then he just shows up five months later and he’s like, “We’re still cool right, I brought you some emeralds?” Lainey at LaineyGossip was complaining about the white male privilege that goes along with “Method acting” and how these dude-bros basically use their Method as an excuse to act like total a—holes. What bugs is that everyone lets them get away with it too – even Charlie’s girlfriend! How is going dark for five months acceptable in a mature, adult relationship?

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.