Cast member Charlie Hunnam attends a premiere for the television series Shantaram in Los Angeles on Oct. 3, 2022.MARIO ANZUONI/Reuters
It has been nearly 20 years since Gregory David Roberts’ novel Shantaram made waves for its heady depictions of life in Mumbai, or Bombay as it was known at the time, in the 1980s. As an escaped convict on the run from Australia, protagonist Lindsay Ford finds refuge amongst the bustling population of expats, urban dwellers and anyone existing in the shadows of this mega-city, whether by birth or by choice.
Ford quickly befriends a local named Prabaker and after a series of misfortunes and robberies, ends up living with him in the slums, turning his latent medical knowledge from his time as a paramedic in Australia into acts of service for his newfound community, attempting to atone for his many previous sins.
Now, that bestselling book has become a series for Apple TV+ starring British actor Charlie Hunnam, Alexander Siddig, Antonia Desplat and Shubham Saraf.
While much has been made of the allegedly autobiographical details in the book, what has given the novel such an enduring legacy is its inquisitive, searching approach to big questions about identity, second chances and whether we can ever truly escape our fate. That was certainly part of the appeal for Hunnam when he first discovered the book.
After starring in biker drama Sons of Anarchy for seven years, “I was in a big transition in my life,” he tells me over Zoom. Hunnam describes feeling like he was in a bit of “arrested development,” having spent so much time and energy working on his career and not enough time developing himself as a person. Finding Shantaram was a bit of a personal revelation. “A lot of the questions I was grappling with, he was tasking himself to answer,” he says of author Roberts.
While playing the role of the quietly anguished Lin Ford might seem like a departure for someone best known for his turn as the leader of a violent outlaw biker gang, the character of Ford actually has a lot in common with Sons of Anarchy’s Jax Teller. Both seem eager to escape their past, or at least the trappings and presumptions that come with it and are determined not to let their destinies be defined by a criminal element that offers both community and mutually-assured destruction.
Hunnam doesn’t just star in the series, he’s also a producer and seems deeply invested in bringing this show to a wider audience.APPLE TV+
Hunnam doesn’t just star in the series, he’s also a producer and seems deeply invested in bringing this show to a wide audience. It’s no small task. With each of the 12 episodes clocking in at an hour, the pace of the show is deliberately slow and sticky, much like a Mumbai night itself. But Hunnam believes in both the story and in Lin as a character who audiences will invest in for the long run.
“The biggest thing for me in this first season was that Lin be as accessible and relatable, and fairly neutral in who he was,” he tells me. “There was a creative push to make the first season feel as exciting to the public as possible that Lin should be kind of a criminal to begin with. And he goes on this incredible journey. I just relentlessly fought that notion, I thought we needed to bring this guy in and be as accessible and vulnerable and wide open as possible,” he says of his hope that viewers will be charmed by Lin even though a darker side will soon be revealed.
The series is certainly charming and the portrayals by Hunnam, Saraf as Prabhu, Desplat as Karla Saaranen and Elektra Kilbey as Lisa Carter are particularly captivating. Even when the writing is a little stilted and corny, the performances add depth and heart. But a bigger obstacle for the series is the white saviour-ness of it all.
Shantaram certainly isn’t the first or last piece of media to use India as a backdrop for a white person’s fast-track to salvation or enlightenment, but where the story may have felt illuminating in 2003 when the book was released, the show in 2022 needs to contend with what it means for a handsome, blond white man to swoop into India and attempt to rescue it from itself.
“There is sort of an indictment made on this novel, you know, more so now than when it was released, that it has a tinge of white saviour to it,” Hunnam offers. To counter that, the show tries to “let India represent itself,” says Hunnam. “I think that we tried as much as possible to allow all of the characters, India being one of them, to stand on their own two feet, and to express their own truth, so that it’s not all coming through the prism of Lin’s perspective or experience.”
I’m not entirely sure it succeeds in expanding beyond that limited perspective, but the visuals and performances make it worth sticking around to find out.
Shantaram is streaming now on Apple TV+