The Making of ‘Shantaram': How the Apple Thriller Fell Through Johnny Depp’s Grasp and Into the Leading Arms of Charlie Hunnam

Johnny Depp was riding high on his “Pirates of the Caribbean” success when another “nearly perfect” project began to wither on the vine.

It was 2007, and all 12,000 Hollywood film and TV writers were on strike.

Among other big movies he had in the pipeline, Depp was attached to star in “Shantaram,” about a former bank-robbing heroin addict who escapes an Australian prison and lands in India, where he struggles to begin an anonymous life in the urban chaos of 1980s Bombay.

Warner Bros. had bought the rights to the internationally bestselling novel of the same name in 2004, a year after it was published. The author, Gregory David Roberts, had written a screenplay.

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But as Jack Sparrow said, “If you were waiting for the opportune moment, that was it.”

Roberts then served as the first domino to fall in the nearly 20-year development and production of “Shantaram,” a sprawling epic that Apple, Paramount TV and “Sons of Anarchy” star Charlie Hunnam would eventually finish, but as a reformulated TV series.

Up-and-coming writer-director Eli Roth replaced Roberts and delivered a rewrite that anchored “Shantaram” for a decade. Peter Weir of “Dead Poets Society” and “The Truman Show” fame was even signed in 2005 to direct before creative differences nixed his involvement.

Two years later, when Indian American director Mira Nair was brought in, Depp remained publicly confident in the project. But cracks were showing.

‘We’ve Just Hit Pause for the Moment’

“Because of what’s going on with the writers strike and everything, we’ve put the movie on, basically on pause,” Depp said in a 2007 interview with India’s NDTV as he promoted the Tim Burton-directed “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” six months after the release of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” the Disney franchise’s third installment.

“We’ve just hit pause for the moment to see how everything goes with the writers strike,” Depp said. “Mira’s work with Eric Roth has been amazing. And I think they’re getting close to something very very, nearly perfect. But with the writers strike, you need to be, make sure everything is — you’ve got all your ducks in a row.”

Asked if the film would be shot on location in Bombay, Depp said it would, that “there would be no place to replicate that.”

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“It would have to be in that area, in Bombay, and I think there’s nobody better than Mira to capture that,” Depp said. “She has a real strong feel for the place, obviously.”

Nair, who had called it a “piece of my heart,” then fell off “Shantaram,” later saying the script was brilliant and was “in a way ready to go” but that the project had collapsed after Depp took on other work amid the Hollywood writers strike. For Depp, “Public Enemies” (2009), “Alice in Wonderland” (2010), “The Tourist” (2010) the fourth “Pirates” movie (2011) and his second Hunter S. Thompson passion project, “The Rum Diary” (2011), awaited.

But “Shantaram” wasn’t dead. With Warner Bros. still holding the rights they paid $2 million for, Joel Edgerton was in 2013 enlisted to play the lead role of Dale Conti, aka Lin Ford, with Depp returning to produce. Or at least, Edgerton entered negotiations for the film, which still needed a director.

Enter Charlie Hunnam, Paramount Television and Apple

Like millions of others, reading “Shantaram” left an impression on the British actor Charlie Hunnam. While vacationing in Thailand, he “devoured” all 936 pages, and amid the uncertainty of the film project, he was convinced it was better suited as a TV series.

As fortune would have it, and as Hunnam put it, “after many, many noble attempts, Warner Brothers threw in the hat and the rights became available.” Bids were sought in 2018. And after a month-long process, Paramount and Anonymous Content acquired “Shantaram” with Apple soon joining the project.

Their intent was to turn it into a TV series.

“I think because of the length and complexity of the story, it’s really impossible to distill it down to two hours,” Hunnam said in an interview with EW.

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Meanwhile, Hunnam was ripe for an opportunity that could build on the success he had with the FX hit series “Sons of Anarchy,” which ended in 2014 after seven seasons. He had since starred in “The Lost City of Z,” “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” and “The Gentlemen,” among other films, but none carried the same level of bravado and signature for Hunnam as the outlaw biker Jax Teller.

“Ultimately stories want to get told, and they can get told at different times with different people,” Hunnam told EW. “I didn’t feel necessarily as though this is my role and I’m the only one who can play it, by any means. It’s an amazing role and an amazing story, and there were a lot of people that would have done a splendid job, but I felt very grateful and fortunate that I got to bring it to life.”

Hunnam signed onto the lead role of “Shantaram” in September 2019.

But the challenges that had dogged “Shantaram” throughout development continued. Six months later — and a month before much of the world went into COVID-19 lockdown — production halted to give showrunner, writer and creator Eric Warren Singer (“American Hustle”) more time to write scripts. Steven Lightfoot (“The Punisher”) was also brought in to lend the production TV experience.

By November, Singer was out, and Lightfoot was in. The shooting locations, originally set for India and Australia, were also reconfigured in mid-2001 with India beset by a massive wave of COVID infections and deaths.

With some shoots to remain in Australia, Hunnam now would be returning to Thailand — ground zero of his “Shantaram” inspiration.

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Critical Reception for “Shantaram”

TV critics had a decidedly mixed view of “Shantaram,” with Rotten Tomatoes giving it a 55% from 20 reviews as of Tuesday.

Among them:

• The Hollywood Reporter called it a show with “the insufferable trappings of yet another white savior story about a damaged guy whose quest for self-actualization leads him to an exotic place where superficial lessons about a previously unknown spiritual system help him and basically nobody else around him.”

• RogerEbert.com says it was “quintessential Apple TV+ fare” but “a lot to get through, and more than a little bloated as a result.” On a positive note, the series “captures the spirit of its source material, albeit in a slightly stretched-out package.”

• The Guardian dissed it as “a bit of a thriller, with a smattering of morality lessons, though its main moral is that if there’s any chance for star Charlie Hunnam to have a conversation after having taken off his top, or being in the process of taking it off, then yes, he will do it.”

• The San Fransisco Chronicle says “there’s nothing stiff or stuffy about ‘Shantaram,’ but the quality is high enough to qualify as prestige television, a term that gets harder to define by the day.”

• Variety was also unimpressed: “Too often on ‘Shantaram,’ Bombay is, first, the site of Lin’s romantic pursuits or personal growth. And it’s a city with far too many stories for that to be the one that consumes all the oxygen.”

Three “Shantaram” episodes are available to stream now, with Apple TV+ to roll out nine more on successive Fridays through December.

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