FX's "Sons of Anarchy" panel featured creator Kurt Sutter, Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman, Katey Sagal, Maggie Siff, Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins.

Don’t call the character Adam Arkin plays in Season 2 of “Sons of Anarchy,” arriving Sept. 8 on FX, a white supremacist. “A separatist. Please,” Arkin told TV critics meeting in Los Angeles. Arkin’s Ethan Zoebelle arrives this season in Charming, the small town run by Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman) and his outlaw motorcycle club. Also new to the show is actor-musician Henry Rollins, in a multiple-episode arc as Arkin’s neo-Nazi henchman.

“We do wonderfully horrible things — very real, very physical,” Rollins said. “And also we do a lot of threatening. Well, he’s the idea man. I go and actually carry it out.” Added Arkin: “I’m more of a conceptual artist.”

Creator Kurt Sutter said of landing Arkin, fresh off “Life”: “It was an important role for us to cast because it’s an antagonist like we’ve never seen before and (he) does, right from the jump, some fairly nefarious things. And it was important for me to get an actor that could bring range and sensitivity to that and someone who you probably traditionally wouldn’t put in the role of a white separatist.”

Rollins was thrilled to get a call from Sutter, a veteran of “The Shield.” “When we got into discussion about the character, I thought it really interesting, and I went at it with all speed. So there’s no hesitation on my part.”

“What is wrong with you?” one questioner asked (in the nicest way) of Sutter, noting that he was famous for some of the darkest content on “The Shield.” In “Anarchy,” the motorcycle club is devoted to protecting Charming against encroaching drug dealers (not to mention corporate developers and the law) while also running an arms-dealing business.

“I’d like to believe that the pushing of that envelope is never gratuitous,” Sutter said. “I’d like to believe that I support it through character, and I will say, even the turn that we take in the premiere, it becomes (an) emotional engine … for some of the bigger seasonal arcs this year.”