Lucky jim

Even if he hadn’t played the lead in Julie Taymor’s extravagant, divisive Beatles musical, Across The Universe, there’d still be something of the British invasion about Jim Sturgess. Maybe it’s the cheeky grin, the Salford education or the tousled hair but in person, you can see why Mr. Sturgess is going down a storm with young American ladies. Like many of his better known screen characters, he is that rarest of things: a genuine English movie pin-up, as opposed to a bumbling, stuttering unlikely Romeo.

He has, additionally, in stark contrast with some of his countrymen, managed to convince as an American leading man. His role as a corrupted Bostonian med student in the wildly successful poker heist movie, 21, earned him a whole new fan base, a swell of well-wishers who know little or nothing of his Surrey origins.
“I’ve become Mr. Accent,” he says, over a very civilised tea at the Clarence Hotel. “I find that I keep little bits of them after I’ve finished each film. I’m always amazed how much you have to learn about an accent. And I’m even more amazed that for all the movies and television shows, that all these tiny regional quirks still survive.”
His mastery of dialect has proved very useful for 50 Dead Men Walking, a high-octane, Belfast-based thriller inspired by ‘supergrass’ Martin McGartland’s 1997 autobiography. The NI accent, a brogue which has frequently tripped up such megastars as Mickey Rourke and Brad Pitt, was, Mr. Sturgess admits, a bit of a tricky one.
“I can’t say it was easy,” he laughs. “We had to do quite a bit of work on it. I looked at some movies just to hear it in my head, did a dialect session, then got myself to Belfast to try things out on the road. It’s a very colourful accent. It’s got a real bounce to it.”
Straining vowels would, for once, prove the least controversial aspect of the project. 50 Dead Men Walking, a stylish thriller fashioned by Canadian writer-director Kari Skogland from turbulent Ulster history, kicks off in the late eighties when roguish suitcase salesman McGartland (Sturgess) is recruited by a British handler (Sir Ben Kingsley) to infiltrate the IRA. He soon rises through the ranks, becoming a top informant until, inevitably, everybody catches up with him.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Sturgess spends much of the film running like a maniac.
“Oh God,” he says, hanging his head in faux shame. “I remember Kari taking me around the opening scene. ‘Right, I want you to run down there, jump over that car, run past there, go around the corner, keep running.’ I thought I’d never manage it, not in the black plimsolls I had to wear.”
Even before 50 Dead Men Walking premiered at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, its attendant controversies were in full swing. Mr. Sturgess‘ American co-star, Rose McGowan (Grindhouse, Sin City), got things started with a red carpet admission; “…Had I grown up in Belfast,” she said. “I would 100% have been in the IRA... My heart just broke for the cause”. Subsequently, Mr. Sturgess’ rather more innocuous comments in Empire magazine were transformed into a screaming headline in the Belfast Telegraph: “IRA were some of the nicest people that I ever met, says actor”.
Today, understandably, he’s choosing his words very carefully.
“I started by reading the McGartland book,” he says. “I never met him or spoke to him but I did meet lots of other people from all sides. We had a lot of technical advice about how somebody in the IRA might do this or that. We didn’t want to glamorise or romanticise that world. We only wanted it to be authentic.”
Happily, Mr. Sturgess will soon be leaving 50 Dead Men’s fallout far behind. Later this year, he’ll be testing his acting chops alongside Harrison Ford and Sean Penn in Crossing Over, a daisy chain drama detailing the trials and tribulations of the American immigrant.
“I mean Harrison Ford! Sean Penn!,” says Mr. Sturgess, excitedly. “I didn’t know whether to work or ask for an autograph.”
He’s also in the process of packing up his itchy woollens for a stint in Siberia on Peter Weir’s The Way Back. A Russian Great Escape, based on the memoir of Slawomir Rawicz, the film follows fugitives from a Siberian gulag escaping to the subcontinent.
“It’s been shocking reading up on gulags,” says the actor. “You just can’t realise how many of them there were. At one point in Soviet history a huge number of the trains were prison transports.”
During his prep phase, the young actor has been making time to sneak around with Julie Taymor and half of U2. The occasion is Turn Off The Dark, a preposterously ambitious musical adaptation of Spider-Man with Julie Taymor at the helm and songs from Bono and The Edge. While no cast is confirmed, Mr. Sturgess has, indeed, been workshopping with the gang on the mega-budgeted Broadway extravaganza scheduled to open in 2010.
“It’s a great bunch of people to work around,” beams Mr. Sturgess. “Julie is wonderful. She’s like this multi-talented child and an incredibly strong woman rolled into one. Everything is possible with her. When she’s on set she’s a big kid in a sweet shop. Then with Bono and The Edge, they’ll go off into a little corner for 20 minutes and come back with two of the best songs you’ve ever heard. It’s like watching a magic trick.”
It is, of course, Jim’s second time in the presence of greatness having previously worked with Ms. Taymor and Bono on Across The Universe, one of last year’s most prominent box office flops.
“I knew it was risky,” says the actor. “When I first heard about it I thought it was a terrible, awful idea. Who would want to do a Beatles musical? Must be some rubbish American project. I went to the audition thinking this is the stupidest thing ever. Honestly, I hooked up my guitar thinking ‘what a load of rubbish’. But it became this really fun, imaginative landscape of Beatles songs. I mean I do understand why so many people were cynical about it. There’s a phrase Bono uses in the film when he’s playing the Ken Kesey character. It’s a quote from the Merry Pranksters – ‘you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus’. That was our mantra for the film.”
He laughs.
“Maybe it should be a mantra for always. A sort of actor’s prayer.”