TRANSFORMATION OF THE YEAR CHARLIE HUNNAM

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Charlie Hunnam had “a divinely architected” ayahuasca trip.

- BY ALYSSA BEREZNAK

turtleneck Hermès pants McQueen belt Artemas Quibble boots (throughout) John Lobb his own watch (throughout) Rolex jewelry (throughout), his own

“I had a big death experience,” he says, his light blue eyes widening and shifting upward.

We’re sitting across from each other in his North Hollywood office. Hunnam, blond and built, is dressed like an upmarket Jax Teller: simple white tee, selvedge denim, and black Converse. His hair is neatly slicked back, and a scruffy matching goatee frames his leading man jawline. He’s cautious to talk about the trip at first, worried I might think it was recreational. But once I tell him I’m familiar with the medicine, he begins to share his journey on what he calls “the astral plane.”

It began, as Hunnam describes in a drawl that’s part Angeleno, part Northern English, with “a really traumatic feeling of holding on and holding on, and feeling a sense of unfinished business and panic.” That panic eventually gave way to a voice repeating the same phrase over and over again: Life is preparation for death. It was, Hunnam says with awe, “like a lullaby easing me off of the precipice that I was on.”

The way he locks into the memory, I get the sense that this experience was steeped in a psychological muck as dark as the Nespresso pods he’d politely brewed for us. After all, not long before he went on that journey, the 45-year-old actor spent nearly nine months in a role where death was on the call sheet daily.

This year, Hunnam starred as Ed Gein in the third season of Ryan Murphy’s Emmy-winning Netflix anthology series