[Video] Charlie Hunnam Gives Update On Dengue Fever He Contracted In India While Filming Apple TV+ Series Shantaram - 8days Skip to main content

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[Video] Charlie Hunnam Gives Update On Dengue Fever He Contracted In India While Filming Apple TV+ Series Shantaram

Charlie Hunnam gets mixed up with the Indian gangsters in the new Apple TV+ series Shantaram.
[Video] Charlie Hunnam Gives Update On Dengue Fever He Contracted In India While Filming Apple TV+ Series Shantaram

In Shantaram, the Apple TV+ series launched last Friday, Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam plays Dale Conti, an Australian convict who breaks out of prison and flees to 1980s Mumbai (then Bombay), where he goes by Lindsey ‘Lin’ Ford. There, the one-time paramedic pretends to be a doctor working in the slums. Did we forget to mention that he also gets mixed up with the local underworld figures? Pretty intense.

Created by Eric Warren Singer (Top Gun: Maverick) and Steve Lightfoot (Marvel’s The Punisher), Shantaram is based on Gregory David Roberts’ 2003 bestselling novel of the same name.

“I am an enormous fan of Greg David Roberts,” Hunnam tells 8days.sg over Zoom from LA. “[The novel] is a wonderful, exciting, thrilling story filled with romance and friendship and betrayal, the underworld, God, and everything in between.”

He adds, “I suppose at the centre of it is the character’s remarkable journey.”

The book’s journey from text to screen was just as epic and tumultuous as Lin’s. The production started in Bhopal, India, in 2019, where he ran into some “significant health issues”.

As he recounted to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show in 2020, Hunnam said, “I got a lung infection, which turns into a sinus infection. And then I got conjunctivitis in both my eyes. Then I got an ear infection. Then I got strep throat, then a bacterial gut infection. And then I got bitten by mosquito and contracted dengue fever.”

If things couldn’t get any worse, something called the Covid-19 pandemic happened and the showrunners were forced to relocate to Bangkok and Melbourne to complete the shoot.

India, not India: Charlie Hunnam and Shubham Saraf in a scene from Shantaram. Though set in Bombay, the Saga Wada neighbourhood in the show’ was shot at Studio Park, a film studio complex just outside of Bangkok. (Psst, it’s the same place where Ms Marvel filmed its Pakistan-set sequences.)

So did he suffer any health issues when filming resumed in Thailand? Thankfully not, Hunnam says. (However, he did hurt himself on the set of Zack Snyder’s Netflix sci-fier Rebel Moon — that's another story for another time.)

Here, he tells us an update on his bout with dengue fever.

Shantaram is now streaming on Apple TV+, with new episodes dropping on Fridays. Watch exclusive 8 DAYS interviews on meWATCH and Mediacorp YouTube Channel.

Photos: TPG News/Click Photos, Apple TV+

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