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Before Jim Sturgess snagged the career-making role of Jude in Julie Taymor’s Beatles-scored movie musical, Across the Universe, he’d been busy with his band while steadily acting in his hometown of London (on radio and TV). In 2008, potentially his breakout year, Sturgess follows a supporting role in The Other Boleyn Girl with a starring turn opposite Kevin Spacey in 21, based on the real story of the M.I.T. students who won millions at Vegas’ blackjack tables. Last week, we sat down with Sturgess at South by Southwest in Austin, where the 26-year-old Briton was adjusting to the glare of the Hollywood limelight.
Time Out Chicago: I read that before Across the Universe, acting had taken a back seat and you were more involved in your band. Then suddenly you’re the lead in a Julie Taymor movie?
Jim Sturgess: I didn’t know from the first two auditions that Julie was the director, and I wasn’t even sure that a Beatles musical was a particularly good idea. But once I found out that it was Julie Taymor, I felt very excited, very safe. She just took me under her wing. She didn’t have to cast me. There were a lot of other people in a lot higher places that were all willing to play that part, and she made such a gamble going with me. And you know, I was just nobody. I was just some kid who turned up at the audition.
TOC: There are rumors she’s developing a Broadway musical of Spider-Man. Where are you with that?
Jim Sturgess: I really don’t know. She phoned me up and she said, “Jim, will you come? I’m doing this Spider-Man musical. Will you and Evan [Rachel Wood] come and help?” And it was with Bono and Edge and they’re writing all the music and she’s directing it. We just got together and started workshopping this crazy idea of a Spider-Man musical. And we performed a rough read-through for the people from Marvel. But that’s all I know of it.
TOC: For 21, what was your way in to playing math-whiz Ben Campbell?
Jim Sturgess: Jeff Ma [Campbell’s real-life counterpart] really was my way. He was full of stories; I was full of questions. When Ben’s talking about an equation in math class he suddenly steps into his world, but you put him with a girl and he’s fairly hopeless.
TOC: What’d you learn about acting from 21?
Jim Sturgess: Being around people like Kevin Spacey and Laurence Fishburne, you’re learning so much. I arrived feeling like a fish out of water—it was a big American film and I was playing an American. Amazingly, when we were doing all the stuff around the casino tables, especially with me and Kevin, so much of it was improvised; in fact, all of it was improvised. The script would say, “They sit at the casino table and play blackjack,” and then we had to fill in all the dialogue. They just left the cameras rolling.
TOC: How’d you get into acting?
Jim Sturgess: It was the only thing that really made sense to me. I was never very good at school; I was never very well behaved. I would play truant quite a lot. I wasn’t good at sitting down and just being talked at. So when a drama lesson or music lesson came along, I was full of enthusiasm for it. My math teachers will be in fits of hysteria when they see me playing this part. And I’m looking forward to their reaction. They’ll be like, there’s no way, there’s no way Jim Sturgess could be a math genius.
TOC: Things must’ve changed pretty significantly in the last year or two, with several films in the works.
Jim Sturgess: It’s been so strange. Actually, right now is the only time I’ve really gone, wow, it’s sort of changed—because I made the films and was working hard, but I felt like I’d always been working hard with music and my plays and short films. And when Across the Universe came out, I was in Belfast shooting another film, so it completely passed me by.
TOC: And Other Boleyn Girl just came out.
Jim Sturgess: Yeah, and certainly the screenings we’ve shown of 21 and the Q&A’s afterwards, it’s been like, Oh, people actually know who I am; that’s strange.
TOC: What’s the story behind your own plays and films?
Jim Sturgess: That was how I started. I did a course up in Manchester, and it was kind of everything: editing and scriptwriting and production. And then I wrote a one-person show and performed it in a small theater and just luckily someone saw me in that and said, “I’d like to recommend you to my agent back in London.” And I was, like, “What’s an agent?”
21 opens March 28.
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