Katey Sagal nears end of the road on ‘Sons of Anarchy’

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Katey Sagal started getting some unusual fan mail after last year’s bloody “Sons of Anarchy” season finale.

(Spoiler alert: stop reading if you haven’t finished watching season six.) People sent the actress a certain kitchen utensil that will make perfect sense to viewers who witnessed her character’s deadly dust-up with her daughter-in-law.

Sagal plays Gemma Teller Morrow, matriarch of the outlaw motorcycle club SAMCRO on the biker drama that revs up for a seventh and final season at 9 p.m. Tuesday on FX.

The riveting premiere that’s hard to watch — and even harder not to — picks up 10 days after that fateful season finale, when Gemma brutally ended Tara’s (Maggie Siff) life with a carving fork, mistakenly thinking her daughter-in-law had ratted on the club.

“I thought [viewers] would hate Gemma after the fork episode,” Sagal said during an interview at the TV critics’ press tour over the summer. “I cannot tell you how it increased my likability for a lot of people. They send me forks in the mail. I autograph them all.”

Sagal has mixed emotions about hanging up her black leather jacket after seven seasons on “SOA,” a series created and written by her husband, Kurt Sutter.

“I’m with Kurt — I really think this is the appropriate time to end it,” she said, likening it to her other long-running series, “Married with Children,” where she spent 11 seasons as lazy, big-haired Peg Bundy.

“’Married with Children’” was a show that nobody thought would succeed,” she said. “This, too, was a show that lots of people didn’t want to support or have put on the network. That’s always the fun part when you’re like, ‘See, this was the right thing to do.’”

“Sons” averaged 7.3 million viewers last season — a series high. In the key 18-to-49-year-old demographic, it ranked as basic cable’s third most popular scripted drama in 2013 behind “The Walking Dead” and “Breaking Bad.”

Sagal’s work on “SOA” is coming to an end but the actress/singer/songwriter isn’t slowing down. In the sequel “Pitch Perfect 2,” she plays the mother of new cast member Hailee Steinfeld’s character. (“I sing a few lines,” she said.)

Sagal also has roles in a couple of upcoming boxing-related movies, “Bleed for This” and “Southpaw,” written by Sutter.

She’s the narrator of NBC’s freshman fall comedy “A to Z.”

“I would definitely do another series,” said Sagal, 60. “I love the cable model. I love 13 episodes. Gives me time to be with my 7 year old.”

Her youngest child, Esme Sutter, was born via surrogate in 2007.

While her husband was a little more than halfway through writing the final “SOA” season this summer, Sagal said she had no idea what fate would await murderous Gemma.

“If it was up to me, I’d get on a bike and ride out of town,” Sagal said. “Gemma would finally ride a bike.”

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