Elite Images / AKM-GSICharlie Hunnam essentially ghosted his girlfriend for five months and still managed to win her back.
The actor was without communication while filming The Lost City of Z in Colombia last year, leaving him unable to communicate with his longtime girlfriend, Morgana McNeils. Though he tried to write her letters, they never got to her, and he decided it would be best to just stop trying to communicate all together.
"We went to Colombia, and the mail system doesn't really work very well," Hunnam explaine to Entertainment Weekly. "It's completely unreliable. I received a letter from her, and I realized that from the tone of it and things she was saying that she hadn't received the two letters that I sent before."
Instead of trying to figure it out, he decided to cut off ties for a while and focus on his role, which he says "makes me sound like a total bastard, appropriately so, but I was very apologetic."
In fact, the separation allowed him to dive deeper into his character as 19th-century explorer Percy Fawcett in the film.
Hunnam explained, "One of the things that [director James Gray] and I felt strongly that we wanted to explore in the film was the conflict between family life and the exterior demands that are made on us and the social and economic demands that we all need to deal with in life, being balanced or in conflict with the internal drive, to be the people we want to be and achieve the things that we want to achieve."
But while the non-communication may have made for better acting, it certainly couldn't have gone very well for Hunnam's relationship. So how did he work things out with McNeils?
"I had the benefit of shooting in Colombia, where they have rather lovely and somewhat cheap emeralds," Hunnam admitted. "My girlfriend is a jewelry designer, so I was able to come back with an appropriately sized gift. It didn't remedy all of the trouble I was in, but it got me halfway there."
Emeralds are a girls best friend!