May 9, 2008
Photographs by Bryan Adams
Styled by Gianluca Longo
"Lucky Jim" – Marianne Macdonald
LUCKY JIM
An unassuming Surrey boy, 26-year-old Jim Sturgess has already been stealing scenes from Kevin Spacey and Natalie Portman. Marianne Macdonald on a Brit actor who broke America first
Strolling into The Pig's Ear pub in Chelsea, looking vaguely Sixties-ish with his bed-hair, drainpipe jeans, striped T-shirt and navy raincoat with its collar askew, Jim Sturgess could be any scruffy, laid-back 26 year old. But in the States girls literally scream when they see him, thanks to Across The Universe, Julie Taymor's acclaimed film musical based on songs by The Beatles, which rocketed him to fame last year. He thinks it's "beautiful" that no one recognises him in his home country.
"I lead a bit of a double life," he admits with a grin. "I was sitting at the bus stop here the other day and there was a 21 [his current box-office smash] poster right next to me and no one batted an eyelid. And a few days ago I was sitting on the bus and someone was reading that Heat magazine, and I didn't even know I was in it, and she flicked on to this page, saying, 'Nine and a half things to know about Jim Sturgess.' And I'm sitting right next to her. I thought, 'I'll give you ten things to know, if you like.'" He gives a good-natured chuckle. Did he say anything? "No way. I was way too embarrassed." He almost blushes.
Jim Sturgess must be an almost unique combination of lack of ambition, gentleness, good looks and star quality. Growing up in Farnham, Surrey, he was never into school (Frensham Heights) - "I would skip it; if there was trouble to get involved in I was usually in there somewhere" - and the only things he was passionate about were acting and music. For years he devoted himself to a band called Dilated Spies: he and his six bandmates rehearsed diligently every day in a "rotting" basement, amid increasing mayhem and drugs. Weeks after it finally imploded, he landed the lead role of Jude in Across The Universe. Baz Bamigboye wrote in the Daily Mail that he had "one of the best rock voices I've heard on the screen in a long time" and Taymor said he had "that thing" that made girls go bananas.
Since then he's landed one big film after another, like a snooker player clearing a table - he's currently starring in 21 (as Ben Campbell, the leader of a group of MIT students that takes Vegas for millions) and The Other Boleyn Girl (as Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman's brother George). He's also just made Crossing Over with his hero Sean Penn and Fifty Dead Men Walking with Ben Kingsley. "I did meet Sean Penn, but not on set, in a nightclub in LA," he admits. "I was like, 'I'm in a film with him, I feel I've got the right to go and introduce myself.' So I plucked up the courage to stroll over and explain that I was in the film he was shooting. But the music was so loud he couldn't hear what I was saying and I just looked like a drunk and demented fan."
In the same way he plays down the glamour of filming with the world's top starlets in The Other Boleyn Girl. "I met Natalie in the middle of a field in Milton Keynes where we were learning to ride a horse for the film. She came bounding up to me, dressed in scuzzy jeans and trainers, it couldn't have been less glamorous." I asked how his girlfriend of four years, Mickey O'Brien, coped with his career. "She understands when I have to disappear. She very respectful of it. She's a musician, so she'll be away touring and she'll come and find me wherever I am and vice versa," he says. They met, it turns out, when their bands shared the same rehearsal room. Is it hard for her when he hangs out with girls like Portman and Johansson? "Not at all," Jim says, looking surprised. "We have such a good relationship, and the minute I introduce my girlfriend to anyone they always love her far more than me."
His parents took in boarders, so he grew up with his older brother Will, now at a graphic design company in Aldershot, and his younger sister Tia, who works in a bar in Bristol, surrounded by actors, language students, "or sharing a bathroom with Saudi Arabian soldiers and things like that; there were always a lot of people around." He got the acting bug at eight after playing 'fieldmouse number three' in The Wind In The Willows. By his teens he was more into girls and music, but at the age of 18 his first band broke up and he found himself jobless in Farnham. "I was like, 'What do you mean? We're going to be this hugely successful band.' 'Jim, we're just not, man.' So everyone went off to college and I didn't really know what to do. It was a pretty low point. I was actually the human dishwasher, the bottom of the food chain, in one of those Harvester pub-restaurants. You can see why my mum and dad were pleased when I decided to take acting seriously. And the manager was just insane, completely f***ing mad. He came back from his day off once - he'd been out gambling, drunk, with sick all down his jacket - picked up this wet, raw steak and slapped me round the face with it. That was when I left."
For some reason Jim won't tell me what his parents, Peter and Jane, do, though they are still together - "very much so, yeah," he says, sounding surprised at the idea they might not be - and Jane kept suggesting university courses he might try. Finally he got interested in the idea of studying acting and performance art at the University of Salford, mainly because it was in the Manchester area where his favourite bands, New Order and The Stone Roses, came from. He got a room in a "shit hole" and the first day he was there got mugged by a group of ten-year-old kids, but loved the course. He came up with a one-man show about a day in the life inside his head, all in poetry, which he put on at a local theatre.
"And it went much better than I could have imagined. It was about finding beautiful things in your life that make you excited rather than just cruising through things, and I ended up fulfulling my own prophecy, because an actor called Malcolm Raeburn came up to me at the end and said he had this agent in London and I should seriously think about talking to her. And I had no concept of what an agent was, or why I would need one, but he sent me off to London to meet this lady," - he takes a taste of his pea and mushroom risotto - "and I turned up scruffy and spotty, and she took me on. And for years I thought she was my boss and I had to go to every audition she told me about or I'd be in trouble."
In fact, he didn't get far for years. After landing a Pizza Hut ad, he mainly got tiny TV bit parts in generic shows: A Touch Of Frost, Heartbeat, the odd mini-series. So he began getting back into music. This was the Dilated Spies era. "We basically lived in this rotting basement in Islington, where we would play music all day until finally the band imploded - thank God, it was getting pretty volatile, a crazy environment, a lot of fighting, certain people were worse than others [with drugs]. So it was just a massive weight off my shoulders when it all came to an end." He was 23. "And then the audition for Across The Universe came along and I just turned up."
We head back into the sunshine - Jim wants to check out a flat in Hackney so he can immerse himself in the area for his next role in Philip Ridley's new movie, Heartless. He strolls down Cheyne Walk like a young, latter-day Paul McCartney. "God," he exclaims, "it's great making movies."
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HEARTLESS 
21 
THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL