‘Sons of Anarchy’: Kurt Sutter Reveals His First Choice for Tig — And It’s Not Kim Coates

Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter recently revealed who his first choice for Tig was, and it wasn’t Kim Coates. On Twitter, Sutter shared a fan question asking him if there were any actors that he wanted to cast in the biker gang series but wasn’t able to. He replied, “My first choice for Tig was Johnny Weissmuller. But apparently, he died in the ’80s.”

Sutter was facetious, as Weissmuller died in 1985 at the age of 79. He was an Austro-Hungarian-born actor who first made a name for himself as a competitive swimmer. The athlete won five Olympic gold medals for swimming, and one bronze medal for water polo, between the 1924 and 1928 games. After retiring from swimming, he took up acting, most notably starring as Tarzan in more than a dozen films. He later went on to star as comic-strip character Jungle Jim in a series of films from the late ’40s through the 1950s. He then starred in a Jungle Jim TV series as well.

In addition to creating Sons of Anarchy, Sutter also co-created the spinoff, Mayans, M.C., which will soon be going into its third season. FX unceremoniously fired Sutter from the show in 2019, so he will not be part of the creative decisions. Still, he had some thoughts after being asked how the show could address the current coronavirus pandemic in the future. “I think the bigger issue, almost is from a creative standpoint. How do you address it? Because you don’t want to hit people over the head with it, right? They’ve just come out of it. They don’t want to be overwhelmed with it, but you can’t ignore it, right? It would be disrespectful to the people who have suffered loss. I think initially, especially with shows that are, you know, present-day, it’s going to be a challenge. I don’t know how Elgin [James, his Mayans M.C. co-creator] is going to do it with Mayans. It’s a tricky thing.”

Sutter continued, “How does it impact that world, and how do you maintain the energy creatively and acknowledge it? My sense is that it’ll most likely need to be a light touch, right? Like, you’ll need to see the awareness of it in terms of public and without it necessarily being the driving force and story. I think that there’s a real creative challenge in how to address it in shows because we’ve never had to really do that before.”