In 2008 Jim Sturgess was about to become a movie star, the kind of actor who combines good looks, talent, and the sort of cinema charisma that attracts audiences. The Englishman had starred in 21 as an American M.I.T. math whiz who wins a fortune counting cards and beating the system at blackjack in Las Vegas, as well as in Across the Universe, a brilliant ode to the Beatles, directed by Julie Taymor, in which he sang and played a cross between Lennon and McCartney. Quite a year. Loosely based on a true story, 21 made $160 million worldwide, and Sturgess, who is tall and handsome and makes smart look sexy, was poised to be, perhaps, the next great leading man. Movie stars—even potential movie stars—are rare; they can be great actors (think of Paul Newman or George Clooney or, more recently, Robert Downey Jr.), but, more elusively, they must be alluring to the paying public. Magically, a star is able to combine his own personality with the character’s, resulting in a melding of the familiar and the new.
Hollywood saw that possibility in Sturgess, and in 2008 he was offered leading roles in big studio movies—everything from the romantic leads Hugh Grant was getting too old to play convincingly to superheroes. He turned them all down. “I wasn’t all that tempted,” he told me in July on the phone from his home in London. “Although it’s hard to say no when it’s more money than you’ve ever seen in your life.” Instead, Sturgess, who is now 30, chose to act in an independent film called Fifty Dead Men Walking, playing an Irish informant. He forsook a very commercial American accent for an Irish accent so thick his mother found it disturbing to speak to him. “She’d say, ‘Speak properly,’” he said, rather proudly. “‘I can’t understand a word you’re saying.’”
This delight in the difficult, the challenging, and the obscure has kept Sturgess busy in movies that no one has seen. In 2010 he was touching and unrecognizable as a man with a disfiguring port-wine birthmark covering his face in Heartless, and he was compelling in *Peter Weir’s The Way Back as a Polish prisoner (yet another accent) who escaped from a Siberian detention camp during World War II.
In truth, I was simultaneously impressed and a little disappointed by Sturgess’s choices. I wanted him to be a star rather than a great-looking character actor. And yet I wasn’t surprised: When I first met him in 2008 at the lobby lounge in the Mercer hotel in New York, he was about to play Peter Parker in a workshop for Taymor’s musical version of Spider-Man. Although the project looked promising then, Sturgess knew he didn’t want to be on Broadway, but he loved Taymor and was still in an Across the Universe afterglow. “We lived that movie,” he told me. “I was working on it for nine months.” He looked over at our waiter. “I was so in the movie that I still find it strange that everyone doesn’t break into Beatles songs all the time. I half expect that waiter to sing.”
Then (and now), Sturgess seemed much more interested in the moviemaking-as-experience idea rather than career (or star) building. As an actor and a person, he wanted to live another life—to soak up and become one with the atmosphere of Vegas, Eastern Europe, Belfast, or wherever the film world took place. “Some people have snapshots,” he told me. “My postcards—my gifts—at the end of these trips are the films.”
Which is why I was secretly thrilled to see Sturgess in One Day as the romantic lead opposite Anne Hathaway. Although the film has a melancholic undertow, it re-establishes Sturgess as a potential movie star. Based on the best-selling novel, One Day follows a couple that meets on the same day for 20 years. Sturgess plays Dexter Mayhew, who starts out callow and effortlessly charming and, as he ages, becomes lonely and adrift. It’s a subtle performance—complex and haunting. “I thought Dexter would be a really fun character to play,” he said. “He’s vulgar and obnoxious, and that’s fun. But he was a lot more tragic and desperate than I thought. Truthfully, I spent a lot of my time being miserable.”
Due to his distance from commercial films, Sturgess was required to audition for director Lone Scherfig to get the part in One Day. “I had to do a screen test,” he said matter-of-factly. “They also wanted me to read with Anne to see if we had ‘chemistry.’ There was all this awful pressure—it was very nerve-wracking—but Anne was great. In the end I didn’t mind auditioning or the screen test. I feel like you know it’s a great project if they ask you to audition.”
