All In The Family

You might imagine that a gruelling and graphically violent television series about the internal and external conflicts of an outlaw motorcycle gang would have a fanbase that could be described as 'select'. That's not the case, however, with Sons Of Anarchy. The long-running series, positively Shakespearean in its heightened drama (indeed, series creator Kurt Sutter has stated Hamlet was his inspiration), has die-hard devotees of all ages and genders around the world. But according to Theo Rossi, who has played gang member Juan Carlos 'Juice' Ortiz since the show premiered in 2008, Sons Of Anarchy's biggest fans are Australian.

“A few years ago, a lot of us from the show appeared at ComicCon in San Diego, this huge fan event, and we were lucky enough to have such a fanbase that we got to close out ComicCon in the biggest hall with this enormous audience,” he recalls. “And it felt like 90 per cent of the people there were Australian! Like nearly everyone who got up to ask a question had an Australian accent! I remember saying to the others, 'We have to go to Australia. We have to.' So when this opportunity came up, it was a no-brainer.”

The opportunity he's referring to is Sons Of Anarchy: An Evening With The Cast, a moderated panel conversation and audience Q&A session with Rossi and co-stars Kim Coates, who plays Tig, and Mark Boone Junior, who plays Bobby Elvis. The trio of actors will be hitting all state capitals during their whirlwind tour, the first such Sons Of Anarchy event to take place outside North America.

“We've been all over the United States and done a few things in Canada but this is our first time doing a journey like this,” Rossi explains. “When it turned into a five-city tour, the three of us got even more excited.”

Sons Of Anarchy fans should probably feel excited as well, given the actors seem to have plenty to say and plenty of energy with which to say it. I know from my own experience that speaking with Coates in the past about the show was exhausting in the best possible way (“Oh, yeah, Kim's an atomic bomb,” laughs Rossi), and Rossi is just as effusive about the process of making Sons Of Anarchy and the finished product. He's not only an actor on the show; he's a fan of the show.

“I always hear actors say they don't like watching things they've been in, but for me I love the show so much that I love talking to people about it just as much, just to get the various reactions to what has happened and ideas about where it's going to go.

“I love it because, at the heart of it, it's a family drama. When you peel back the layers and remove the bells and whistles, it's a story that deals with all the things many of us deal with – parents, children, best friends coming and going in your life, love, heartbreak, loss – but under very heightened circumstances. The stakes are higher, that's all.”

And the stakes keep getting raised more and more, it seems, for Rossi's character Juice. His first few seasons on the show weren't without incident, both kind of humorous (his efforts to drug a guard dog proved ineffective when he dosed the mutt with meth, firing the animal right up) and a bit harrowing (he was on the receiving end of a nasty but luckily non-fatal prison shanking). But when the show's fourth season rolled around, Juice was killing people, getting pressured by the authorities to snitch on his fellow gang members and eventually attempting to commit suicide. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

“It's been such a tremendous ride,” Rossi says of his role as Juice. “He started off as the newest member of the club, this happy-go-lucky kid who wanted to do right, make people happy and be a good soldier. Then there were all these revelations in season four that might have led to him losing this family that had become his whole world, and he made some very bad decisions to try to keep it. Those decisions have brought him to the point where we all last saw him on the show. Juice now is a completely different person to the Juice we first met at the beginning, and it's so rare that you get to play a character who goes through such changes. He goes from the funny kid to the killer to the guy who looks like he's going to break open at any moment. And I'm as interested as everybody else to know what's going to happen to him next!”

Rossi is quick to praise his Sons Of Anarchy co-stars, who have become some of his best friends over the course of making the show. But his highest praise is for Sutter, saying that the series creator designed and developed a character in Juice that enabled Rossi to go beyond what he thought he was capable of.

“It's the difference between painting in black and white and painting with a full rainbow of colours. To be able to explore all these different things and show all these different sides is the reason I got into acting. It's why I took on this hustle! But I never imagined it would happen all in one character. At the end of the day, when the dust clears, I've been doing this for 15 years but my real trajectory started in 2008 when I started doing this show. I don't even really think about what I did.