FX "Sons of Anarchy" season 7 production officially opens with lead star Charlie Hunnam filming the show's final season promo video. Series creator Kurt Sutter recently announced the casting of a "major role" and revealed that filming for SOA season 7, episode 1 will start Thursday or Friday this week.

The announcement came from Sutter's latest video blog WTF Sutter, where he revealed the casting and filming schedules while playing with his bird. The tattooed showrunner that they will have their first table read on Tuesday, May 27, so that could be interesting since the table could be the first reunion of the cast since the season 6 finale.

When it comes to the casting of the new major role, Sutter is waiting for the actor or the actress to announce it. "I don't want to announce, I don't want to steal publicity thunder, so I will wait until either the network or the actor issues some kind of statement," he said in his recent video update and added that the new character will be in at least eight episodes for the show's finale, or "probably more."

Returning SOA director Paris Barclay will direct the season 7's pilot episode and Bill Gierhart will direct the second episode. Because of scheduling conflicts, the cast and crew of the show will be shooting a chunk of episode 2 while filming the pilot episode.

"So we will have a big through read-through, we're going to read the first two episodes, then I'm going to tone the first two episodes together," Sutter added. "And then we'll shoot the two of them. We're not finishing simultaneously-sometimes you'll have two episodes, and if a lot of the locations dovetail into each other, you'll crossboard them and shoot them together."

Sutter also revealed that there's so much information in each episode that its best keep them contained, the reason why he doesn't like crossboarding so much. "The reality is that by episode 3 I'll never have two scripts ready by the same time," he concluded.

"Sons of Anarchy" Season 7, episode 1 is scheduled to premiere in September.