Behind the mind of one of the most important crime shows during the Second Golden era of Television, Kurt Sutter’s legacy on Sons of Anarchy has continued to inspire numerous other TV series with the show’s gritty mixture of sex, violence, and vulgarity that has come to define Stutter’s signature style as a visionary and creative tour de force. But besides perhaps the series’ most hardcore followers, few have known of Stutter’s arduous road to success that has ultimately come to form his creative outlook, making his creations more than just fictional brutality.
Kurt Sutter’s Early Life and Career
Kurt Sutter was born and raised in Rahway, New Jersey. The youngest in a family of three, he came from a dysfunctional family which lacks traditional role models: his mother was a drenched alcoholic and chain-smoker diagnosed with cirrhosis and emphysema, and his father, a General Motors executive, who paid little to no attention to the family. Sutter spent most of his boyhood indoors, away from people, and three feet in front of a TV. He picked up the fundamentals of storytelling there, as well as the comic significance of anvils.
Kurt thereon spent six years working as an actor in New York City after earning a BA in Film from Rutgers University. He was 400 pounds then, a crippling drug addict, and an alcoholic with undiagnosed anorexia. By the time he had dropped half his body weight, he has undergone numerous surgeries over the years to remove to accommodate his desire to be slim. Kurt Sutter spent his 20s and early 30s studying to be an actor. He appeared in various off-Broadway productions; in theaters, lofts, roofs, and holding cells. He relocated to Los Angeles again in the early 1990s, where he started teaching and directing.
Kurt Sutter later returned to New York City as a result of this career concentration, where he joined the faculty of The Gately-Poole Acting Studio on Theatre Row in instructing the Sanford Meisner Technique of Acting and overseeing performances at The Nat Horne Theatre. Kurt received an MFA Fellowship at Northern Illinois University in 1995.
Creative Break
Whilst in Chicago, Kurt was inspired by the dramatic masters, such as Strindberg, O’Neill, and Genet, whose creative works he had grown accustomed to when he began crafting plays and developing screenplay concepts. Sutter then returned to Los Angeles after receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree and penned his first screenplay, “Delivering Gen”. The screenplay received industrial appraisals and was successfully sold to a studio in 2000.
Kurt’s significant career break arrived in 2001 when he became a writer on the creative staff of FX’s freshly drama cop series known as The Shield. The series was as groundbreaking as it was revolutionary for its time, incorporating gritty realism, complex worldbuilding, and elaborated character developments, establishing as well as refining Sutter’s creative interest for damnation and brutality along with a flair for theatrical poetics. Over the following 7 years, Stutter learned the principles of fearless television storytelling and began launching himself headfirst through the ranks to become one of the show’s prized executive producers.
Then came Sons of Anarchy, a crime thriller seven-year Shakespearean eruption of vigilantism, political corruption, racism, loyalty, and human transformation, that immediately strikes a chord with the cultural zeitgeist. The critically acclaimed series about outlaw motorcycle gangs grow in massive popularity to quickly become the biggest hit television show in the FX network’s history at the time, catapulting Kurt Stutter into the Hollywood A-listers.
Kurt, a self-described misanthrope, became infamously notorious at the peak of his fame, as his tendency to be vocal about his thoughts without remorse resulted in more than a few skirmishes with Hollywood top players. One of such includes the TV Academy, which perennially neglected Sons from a nomination much less an actual award.
Kurt Sutter’s Other projects
After Sons of Anarchy ended its seven-year run, Stutter continues to embark on a row of remarkably astounding creative output. He wrote the gritty feature-length boxing thriller Southpaw, originally scripted for Eminem but eventually starred Jake Gyllenhaal. He produced Lucas Stand, a comic book miniseries, and The Bastard Executioner, a historical drama that aired on FX for one season. He continued to work on Mayans MC, a Sons of Anarchy spinoff for FX for three years before exiting as the showrunner, with the series now continuing into its fourth season without him.
Nowadays, with severed relations with FX, Kurt has teased several possible projects, which include a potential The Shield spinoff with its original creator Shawn Ryan, an original feature-length film directed by him, as well as his return to television soon. Kurt currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife, actor Katey Sagal who also starred in Sons of Anarchy in a leading role, his two stepchildren, Sarah and Jackson, and his daughter with Katey, Esme.
