The Original Son of Anarchy

The most important thing to know about Kurt Sutter is that he once weighed 400 pounds. One might wish it otherwise, but what can you do? Without that immense amount of weight planted firmly in his background, he wouldn’t be here today, looking tough and trim at 190 tops, 54 years old, arms slathered in tribal tattoos, hair dragged back into a ponytail, tugging at a patch of peppery chin scraggle inside the North Hollywood building where he oversees everything that has anything to do with the ultraviolent, super­bloody motorcycle psychodrama and mega FX hit, Sons of Anarchy.

Actually, it’s the biggest hit in the history of the network, by far, and its success has been rollicking. It averaged 2.6 million viewers an episode in 2008, its first year, jumped to 4.5 million its second year, and this fall 10.6 million people watched the first episode of Season Seven the night it premiered. Its fans are fanatical. They get themselves tattooed with the gang’s grim-reaper symbol. They make their own YouTube teaser trailers. They grieve over the deaths of beloved characters. And it’s entirely Sutter’s doing. He conceived Sons, produces it, often writes it, sometimes directs it, and right now today, as SOA enters its final season, has gathered together his senior staff for what’s known as a “tone meeting” for an upcoming episode. Sons isn’t high-minded, highbrow fare, of course, so that’s not the kind of tone they’re talking about; instead, these meetings are about getting it right – Sutter’s vision of life in a gun-running, family-comes-first-unless-they-fuck-you-then-you-fuck-them-back gang of Harley-happy dudes and their ladies.

Sutter slides toward the table. For the past hour, he’s dealt with the finer points of blackmail, silencers and how far through a dead guy’s back a shard of glass should stick. Then comes the matter of gouging out a man’s eyeball and exactly how you do it. But first things first. “In the past, when we’ve looked at body parts, it’s been hard to see what they are,” Sutter says. “So this time, let’s just make sure we’re very clear it’s not, like, an oyster or a penis, OK?” A few people nod. Others scribble notes. No one laughs. This is serious business.

“We should arrange it so it looks up at you, and blood is gushing out the socket,” says Paris Barclay, a Sons executive producer and this episode’s director. “The problem is, his hands are tied, so he can’t hold his eyeball, so what do you see then?”

Sutter plucks at his T-shirt thoughtfully. “If he’s down and it’s dark and he’s screaming and moving around, have him close his eye, and it’ll be all swollen and shit, and we’ll put strips of skin and shit in there, and then just goo. And blood.” More nodding. More note-taking. He goes on, “OK, now let’s figure out what’s going to be used to do that.”

At this point, the floor opens up to a free-for-all. “Isn’t it traditionally a spoon?” one guy says.

“I’d use a knife myself,” says a different guy.

“But then you’d kill him, ’cause you might hit the brain.”

“Well, the problem with a spoon is, it doesn’t have a good edge to it.”

“What about a grapefruit spoon?”

“How about a spork?”

And so on. Finally, Sutter jumps back in. “Let’s just look up ‘cartel torture’ and see how they removed eyeballs, OK?” And that’s where the matter is left. It’d be easy enough to just go with, say, the grapefruit spoon and call it a day. Who would care? But that’s not how Sutter operates. He cares. He cares very deeply, and darkly, which is what has led to all the many singular delights the show has delivered: castrated child-rapists, tattoos removed by blowtorch, far-flung amounts of Jackson Pollock blood splatter, death by crucifix, death by fork, a chopped-off head simmering in a vat of chili, face-eating ants, tongues self-severed to keep from tattletale-ing, and more histrionic-size emotions than you can shake a cattle prod at, all in the service of trying to answer the question that Shakespeare poses in the first line of Hamlet, whose essential warped triangle of mother, son and stepfather Sons of Anarchy has been most often compared to. Spoken into darkness, the question is, “Who’s there?” Which, of course, is a good question to ask of Sutter, as well.