These Sons of Anarchy Secrets Will Rev Your Engine

Kurt Sutter Wasn't Onboard at First

Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter, at the time a writer on FX's gritty cop drama The Shield, wasn't automatically onboard when the idea for a show about outlaw biker gangs was pitched to him by father-son producing team Art and John Linson.

"I just felt like I’m not the guy you go to to adapt anything,” Sutter recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “My best asset is my imagination."

But FX gave him plenty of room to roam and ended up with its biggest-ever hit (traditionally speaking), as 10 million people tuned in each week when the violent drama was at peak viewership.

Kurt Sutter Wrote the Role of Gemma for Wife Katey Sagal

Getting to work with his old lady also helped grease the wheels for Sutter.

"He came to me as he was writing it, and said 'I think I have a part for you,' but he didn't really tell me what it was," Katey Sagal, who played tough-as-nails matriarch Gemma Teller, shared on NPR's Fresh Air in 2013. "And I didn't really know what it was until I actually read the script."

When she wed Sutter in 2004, his first trip down the aisle and her third, "I already had two children, and he’s their stepparent, and I was very protective of my children," the actress explained. "He hadn’t been around that kind of energy quite so much, so I think that’s what was the springboard for Gemma. It was not so much the heinous things she does; it was that at her core, her motivation is her child. At any cost, she will protect him and her club.”

Charlie Hunnam Was Jax From Day One

Sutter saw Charlie Hunnam in the 2005 football-crime drama Green Street Hooligans and wanted the British actor for the role of Hamlet.

That is, the role of Jax Teller, whose mother Gemma has married the man who replaced Jax's late father as president of their local motorcycle club/criminal enterprise under murky circumstances.

Ron Perlman Wasn't the First Choice to Play Clay

Ron Perlman wasn't the first choice to play Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, Redwood Original (SAMCRO) president Clay Morrow, Jax's stepfather and eventual nemesis.

Rather, Scott Glenn was in the pilot, but then got word from Sutter that the network wanted to go in a different direction.

“I understood going into it that they were looking for a more operatic version of this guy,” Perlman told Fresh Air in 2015, praising the actor he replaced as "brilliant" but "very subtle."

And no hard feelings for Glenn, who assured The Hollywood Reporter in 2020 that not playing Clay set him on the course that eventually led him to The Leftovers in 2014, which he called the "single best acting experience I’ve ever had."

Ron Perlman Wasn't a Natural

Perlman had a steep learning curve to overcome to look natural on a bike.

The native New Yorker was learning how to ride a motorcycle for "a movie that never happened," he told NPR, then "never rode any more than that until Sons Of Anarchy came around. And depending on who you ask, I never did much riding after the fact, either. Me and the bike…let's put it this way, I'd rather be eating Haagen-Dazs."

No F--ks Given

SOA seemingly pushed every envelope possible, but Sutter recalled having to jump through a lot of hoops aside from not being allowed to use the F-word in those days.

 “I still get lots of Standards & Practices notes about violence and nudity and language,” he told Entertainment Weekly ahead of the 2014 series finale. "And it’s arbitrary in that it changes every year."

Spoiler Alerts

Protecting plot twists became paramount as the series went on.

"For casting, we were getting screwed because people were taking sides and giving away story points," Sutter told EW, "so now we write separate scenes for auditions that don’t give out any story points but essentially cover the same emotional range that we need."

If something did leak, "I don’t think it’s ever gonna stop people from watching," he added, "but you hate anything getting spoiled, especially on a show where we sort of pride ourselves on doing things that are unexpected."

Katey Sagal Figured She Was Cooked After Gemma's Most Shocking Moment

“When I first realized that Gemma was going to kill Tara, I had a moment like, oh s--t, man, nobody’s going to wanna see Gemma again. She’s killing beloved Tara!” Sagal told People about the jaw-dropping season six finale in which Gemma, thinking Maggie Siff's Tara has betrayed them, stabs her son's beloved in the head with a carving fork.

And yet, Sagal recalled, "The very next day, I went to do an autograph session and people were showing up with forks for me to sign."

Maggie Siff On What It Was Like Getting Forked Over

Siff said she found out when season six got underway that Sutter planned to kill off Tara, as "there was something about the way he sighed" when she asked about her character's arc.

"The knowledge that it was going to happen—it felt unreal, and then surreal," she told THR in 2013 after the episode aired. "And then shooting it was really hard. It was really technical, and we had our stunt doubles there."

Siff admitted, "It’s a very surreal thing to watch yourself be brutally murdered...But as an actor I feel like it’s an amazing way to go out, it’s like a lot of fireworks."

A Song to Die For

Sutter was apparently effing around when he told EW he had to "tap into some of my big connections" to get the rights to the song he envisioned for the closing minutes of the series finale.

Playing during Jax's final ride?

"Come Join the Murder," which was co-written by Sutter and performed by The White Buffalo and SOA's house band The Forest Rangers (who also provided the show's theme song, "This Life").

Sutter shared in an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics.

Taylor Sheridan's Salary Dispute Led to His Character's Death

Long before he presided over his own small-screen universe, Taylor Sheridan played another doomed member of law enforcement on SOA.

Which was cool, except he was paid "less than virtually every other person on the show and not enough for me to quit my second job," the Yellowstone creator told Deadline in 2021. And when negotiations didn't go his way, "that’s really when I quit. It wasn’t so much over money. It was so much more that that’s how the business saw me.

Let's say, Deputy Chief Hale got run over so Sheridan could run.

Taking a Risk on Walton Goggins

Walton Goggins has long since proved he can play anyone in anything, but at the time Sutter wondered if audiences would buy The Shield alum as anyone other than LAPD Detective Shane Vendrell—let alone the role of trans sex worker Venus Van Dam in SOA.

The White Lotus alum was ultimately really proud of the character, who paired with Kim Coates' murderous Tig to form the show's least toxic couple.

"It was so smart for Kurt to approach it that way, through humor and through real curiosity on behalf of these ultra-masculine men," Goggins reflected. "It felt so genuine and so real...Once the shock is over, you say to yourself, 'You know what, I get it. She's really sexy. What a very cool lady.' I hope we've done that."

Shooting Through This World

The makeup artists had to get very skilled at crafting realistic bullet holes.

"One time she did six bullets in six minutes, in a pit, in the middle of the night," makeup artist Michelle Garbin told EW in 2014, referring to the show’s head of makeup, Tracey Anderson.

Anderson quipped, "I just wanted to get out of the pit."

Charlie Hunnam Had Trouble Riding Off Into the, Er, Sunset

"It was actually quite emotional for me, living and loving that guy for eight years, to have to finally put him to bed," Hunnam told Glamour UK in 2017.

After wrapping Jax's final scenes, “I found myself going back to set a lot," he recalled. “I knew the security guards and for a couple of days said, ‘Oh, I forgot something,’ so they’d let me onto the set, and I’d just walk around at night because I wanted to be in that environment and go through a personal process of saying goodbye."

Kurt Sutter Always Knew Jax's Fate, But Considered an Ambiguous Ending

"I had a sense from the beginning of this ride that I liked the notion of Jax being brought to the same place of his father but getting it right," Sutter told EW in 2014. "And the idea that he was going to go out in the same way—whether it’s tribute, whether it’s going out on the road—but I wasn’t sure how much of it I was gonna leave up to the imagination of people."

But then, Sutter continued, "I felt like this has not been a show of what-ifs. This has always been a show about direct, specific choices, and direct, specific consequences, so I realized I needed to be clear in terms of whether it happened or it didn’t. And I just felt that it ultimately was the greatest sacrifice, and that’s how it would have to end."

Hunnam agreed, sharing that his character's voluntarily violent end "felt like the greatest celebration of who Jax was."