The Sons of Anarchy, aka SAMCRO, might operate above the law (see: gunrunning, murder), but please, don’t call them a gang. These “motorcycle enthusiasts” are after the same American dream as everyone else, says Sons of Anarchy series creator Kurt Sutter. As Season 3 opens, their path — which finds the club’s matriarch on the lam and the baby of her son, SAMCRO vice-president Jax, kidnapped — is simply a little more dangerous than most people’s.
“I don’t necessarily think of these characters as being bad men or bad women,” says Sutter. “Although the solution and their actions are quite often different than ones we would choose, their motivations are often the same as ours, whether it’s protecting their family or protecting their hometown.”
Ron Perlman, who plays a club founder and current president, has no qualms about making a hero out of a character that is typically the villain.
“(SAMCRO has) an incredibly well-articulated code of values that sort of permeates its way through the whole family — because it is a family,” Perlman says of the Sons. “It’s men and women and children and earners and caretakers and spenders. Family drama is what it is, and we’re just fighting for the things that are going to make us have the lives we want to live.”
Even if that existence leads to a showdown with the Irish Republican Army this season?
“No one is going to tell us what that life should or should not be,” Perlman says, speaking like a true club president. “We make up our own rules.”
