Charlie Hunnam famously walked away from starring as the billionaire sex game playboy Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, which the actor is now claiming was due to a nervous breakdown caused by a hectic filming schedule.

Charlie Hunnam's Nervous Breakdown

Routinely faced with questions about why he backed out of filming Fifty Shades of Grey, Hunnam has stated that it was scheduling – not fear that the project would negatively impact his career – that led to the decision. "I wouldn't have signed up in the first place if I didn't want to do it," Hunnam told Moviefone.

Hunnam explained that if he’d stayed on as Christian Grey, he’d have to slip out of his Sons of Anarchy character Jax Teller and into that of Christian with just a few days in between, missing rehearsal for the adaption of E.L. James’ bestselling erotic novel. Then, less than a week after shooting Fifty Shades, he’d have to get into the headspace of another character for Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak.

"I was going to finish Sons at like 11 p.m. Friday night, get on the plane Saturday morning to Vancouver for Fifty, missing the whole first week of rehearsal and start shooting Monday morning," Hunnam said.. "And I was going to shoot that film, wrap that on the Wednesday and the following Monday I was going to start shooting Crimson Peak in Toronto."

If he was going to play Christian Grey, Hunnam wanted to do it well, especially considering the attention surrounding the project. He didn’t want to play the character if he couldn’t do it in top form.

"Because Fifty's going to be massive, it's going to be huge,” he explained. “I really didn't want to fail on such a grand scale and I just couldn't transition from Jax Teller to Christian Grey in 48 hours. I bit off more than I could chew and it was painful. I loved the character and I wanted to do it."

Jamie Dornan ended up replacing Hunnam in the role of Christian and he's playing opposite Dakota Johnson's Anatasia Steele. Fifty Shades of Grey is slated to hit theaters Valentine's Day weekend 2015.