It is Sam Riley’s first time in New York City, but given the elegantly dilapidated state of his surroundings — a grand house that has been through better days, on a soundstage at Pier 59 Studios — it might as well be Leeds. The weather outside is what you might imagine Leeds to be: gray, drizzly, vaguely depressing. Yet today, Riley, who is 27, couldn’t be farther from his English roots. Little more than a year ago he was folding shirts in a Leeds warehouse, his dreams of becoming a rock star — not to mention his band, 10,000 Things — shelved indefinitely by the record label and a vindictive 1-out-of-10-points review. Things can’t get any worse, he thought, so he might as well act. “Maybe I’m going to have to swallow my pride and do TV or something just to get some money,” Riley recalls thinking. “I’m never going to be a singer again.”
One week later, he found himself at an open call for Anton Corbijn’s “Control,” a small-budget, independent film based on the life of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the short-lived but highly mythologized Manchester band Joy Division, who committed suicide at age 23 on the eve of the band’s U.S. tour. Riley’s acting experience until this point could be safely summed up as one star turn with the National Youth Theatre that was impressive enough to get him an agent and a couple of forgettable one-line roles. Corbijn was similarly untested. As a young photographer, he first shot Joy Division in 1979, but he had never directed a feature film. “We met some more well-known actors initially,” Corbijn says. (Rumor was that Cillian Murphy was among those up for the part; the role of Ian’s wife, Debbie, went to Samantha Morton.) “But I started to realize that Ian Curtis’s shoes were pretty scary to fill for most of them.”
And so it was that Riley returned to singing, this time in Curtis’s haunting baritone and herky-jerky onstage persona (Curtis suffered from epilepsy and often seemed to teeter on the brink of a seizure), in front of a cast of hundreds of die-hard Joy Division fans who had no problem approaching Riley as he drank his morning tea to inform him that they had seen the real Joy Division perform 10 times and that he’d better be good.
Riley was better than good. He largely cobbled together the role using about an hour of existing live footage, some bootlegs and his own life experience of being from a small England town and playing in a band. “I could have searched for another 10 years and not found a better ‘Ian,’ ” says Corbijn, who mortgaged his house to keep the production going after his producers dropped out. Indeed, the two most notable qualities of the film are the romantic, inky quality brought by the cinematographer Martin Ruhe (considered another risky choice) and Riley’s moving, tightly wound performance.
Meanwhile, Riley’s own life has taken a nice plot twist: he is now living in Berlin with the actress Alexandra Maria Lara, who plays the journalist with whom Curtis had an affair, and he is working on his next feature film, “Franklyn,” opposite Ryan Phillippe and Eva Green. Yet the decrepitude of today’s set, created by Scott Pask, the Tony-winning set designer (“The Coast of Utopia,” “The Pillowman”) and the identical twin of this magazine’s men’s fashion director, Bruce Pask, can’t help reminding him that things could have turned out different. When it is pointed out to the actor that the cage on the table is missing its bird, Riley responds, without missing a beat: “I ate it. What can I say? Times is tough.”
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