“Sons of Anarchy” returns Tuesday at 10 p.m. on FX.
Credit: Prashant Gupta/ FX Network
Death is a way of life for the outlaw bikers of “Sons of Anarchy.” But with the murder of Tara (Maggie Siff) at the end of Season 6, tragedy — and betrayal — hit the club harder than ever. SAMCRO president/widower Jax (Charlie Hunnam) is hell-bent on revenge in the series’ last 13 episodes; in teasers for the seventh and final season of the FX drama, he’s even seen morphing into the Grim Reaper.
When Season 7 premieres, 10 days have passed since Tara’s death, and Jax “is in a very schizophrenic state,” Hunnam says. “He’s obviously very, very sad and vulnerable and kind of broken, but there’s a huge amount of vengeance and anger in his heart. At least in the very beginning … he knows what he wants to do, but he can’t get away from the fact that the love of his life has just been taken from him.”
Jax certainly didn’t see Tara’s gruesome death-by-fork-stabbing coming, but neither did series creator Kurt Sutter — at least not in its minute details. Though he has always had a sense of where he wanted the series to end, Sutter says he was better off playing exact storylines by ear. Even in the middle of writing the final season, Sutter admits he wasn’t exactly sure where his characters would take him episode by episode.
“I’ve learned that the looser I grip that idea [of a blueprint], the better the seasons are,” he says. “And this season really isn’t any different. I came in with how I wanted the season to end, which will be obviously the end of the series … but things change with different story ideas. So it’s always sort of been heading in the same direction, but the way I’m getting there continuously changes.”
One major thing we do know: Sutter told Entertainment Weekly back in August that “two club members will be dead” before the series’ finale — and there aren’t that many left to begin with. Fear the Reaper, indeed.
‘SOA’ goes musical
Marilyn Manson and Courtney Love will appear on “SOA” this season, but not like you’ve typically seen them — they’ll be playing a white supremacist and teacher, respectively. How’d Sutter snag them?
“Manson, I had become friends with through some music buddies and he’s a huge fan of the show,” Sutter says. “And that was him basically just wearing me down. … Courtney, I don’t know that well. I was a huge Nirvana fan, and so there was that connection. She had expressed interest in wanting to work on the show, and then we had this role of a schoolteacher. And I thought who better than Courtney Love?”
