Dakota Johnson didn’t let Charlie Hunnam off easy over turning down the role of Christian Grey in “Fifty Shades of Grey” when the pair recently crossed paths.
Hunnam said he had “no regrets at all” about dropping out of the 2015 erotic romantic drama based on E. L. James’ books of the same name.
He also recalled how Johnson reacted when the almost on-screen love interests ran into each other a decade after the movie’s release.
“She gave me a bit of a hard time about it in a very fun way,” Hunnam, 45, told Variety about passing on starring as the film’s leading man, which ultimately went to Jamie Dornan.
In the interview pegged to “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” and published on Tuesday, the “Sons of Anarchy” alum joked that he “just wasn’t thinking clearly” when it came to taking the job before abruptly backing out in 2013.
Hunnam, meanwhile, laughed while saying he’s “never looked back” since turning down the blockbuster, which earned $85 million during its opening weekend.
Johnson, 35, and Dornan, 43, went on to make two additional flicks for the franchise: “Fifty Shades Darker” (2017) and “Fifty Shades Freed” (2018).
Dornan spoke about the challenges of playing the high-profile role.
“These books were loved by fandom. Really loved, obsessively loved and despised by every critic. Real critics hated the books,” he told British GQ in 2021, noting he was “relieved” when the role initially went to Hunnam.
“[I thought], ‘F—, that’s great, what a nightmare for that guy. He’s going to have all this scrutiny,’” Dornan admitted.
While the actor confessed he “felt the wrath of hatred” from playing Christian, an attractive, young businessman with a dominant sexual appetite, the opportunity opened doors for his career.
“Every move I have made in my career, post those films, I have only been able to do because of those films,” he shared elsewhere in the interview.
“All of the stuff, like ‘Belfast,’ ‘Beyond Private’ or any well-received, more independent stuff I’ve done the last five or six years … they’re only paying for those films to be made off my name because I’m in a franchise that made $1.4 billion. That’s how that works. It’s all part of it, it’s given me so much, so of course, I don’t regret it,” Dornan explained.
Hunnam, meanwhile, revealed in 2023 that he had “taken a little hiatus” from acting, but he’s back as the leading man once again in the third season of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series “Monster.”
With the hit previous seasons being about Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers, this season’s focus is on serial killer Ed Gein, played by Hunnam, who’s notorious for skinning human corpses.
The Wisconsin native became known as The Butcher of Plainfield for the disturbing nature of his 1950s crimes.
True crime historian Harold Schechter, who wrote the book, “Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho,” previously explained to The Post that Gein’s “whole thing was trying to reconstitute his mother by digging up the bodies of these middle aged women in the communities around him, bringing them back to his farmhouse, making various household objects out of their body parts, and a skin suit that he would wear and pretend he was his own mother.”
Despite investigators discovering the remains of ten women in Gein’s home, he was only linked to two murders.
In 1968, Geins was found guilty by reason of insanity and spent the rest of his days in Wisconsin mental institutions until he died from lung cancer in 1984 at age 77.
All eight episodes of “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” are available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, October 3.
