How this British star's teenage efforts to impress girls finally came in handy

Sydney Morning Herald

17-06-2025

Music, you might add, is one of Sturgess's great unresolved loves. Growing up in Surrey, England, he was always in bands, running the gamut from hip-hop to indie. He has never lost his fervour, even as he scaled the Hollywood ladder to A-list acclaim, through movies including 2012's Cloud Atlas and the original 2011 adaptation of David Nicholls' One Day.
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Tousle-haired, bearded and sleepy eyed, he looks as much a wan troubadour as he does a gleaming celebrity. Even last year he released an album as his alter ego King Curious. Spoiler – it's good. But it's also telling that Sturgess chooses to perform under another name.
'I get it – there's always a bit of an edge to it when an actor puts a record out. It's always, a bit, 'Uh-oh, hold your breath.' And rightly so, I would be exactly the same if I saw an actor put a record out. But the reaction [to his own record Common Sense for the Animal ] was amazing. I was so stoked that all these music magazines really took it on.'
It meant that when he first got the script for Mix Tape what he most wanted to know was what was going to be on the soundtrack. Because frankly, if the tunes weren't right, then Sturgess wasn't on board. 'The music made me a little bit nervous because when I got the script it wasn't established what tracks we would be using,' he says.
That's also part of the subject in Mix Tape.
'Everyone has such a difficult relationship with music and what tracks were important to them,' he says. 'And Lucy the director [Lucy Gaffy, Totally Completely Fine] was Australian, so I was hoping that she would get on board with the same music I thought Daniel should be listening to. Even my wife and I started arguing about different possibilities for what music he'd like.'
Thankfully the tunes are right, at least to my ears – many of the high points of Madchester (the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Tte Charlatans) and the era just preceding it (Joy Division, New Order) are all present and correct.
But Mix Tape is also interested in the way we consume music, now and then, and how that affects us. Back then it meant a C90 crafted over weeks from a twin cassette deck. These days it's streaming, shared playlists, likes and comments.
'With the tech now, you just send over a playlist of a track on YouTube to each other, but it doesn't hold the same value, I don't think,' Sturgess says. 'Back then you had to put real effort in to recording a song on a tape, do a bit of artwork on the front, call it something funny and cool …'
That doesn't mean that Sturgess is a Luddite. He sees the storytelling possibilities inherent in the new tech. 'On the other hand, phones and relationships is interesting. They provide this secret link to another world in everyone's back pocket and it means that a two-way relationship always has a third party – the phone.'
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Music also engenders nostalgia, a what-was-I-doing-when-I-first-heard that frisson, and that goes for Sturgess, too. He filmed the Australian sections of Mix Tape in Sydney, taking him away from his home and family in east London and back to a city he last visited when he was barely older than the young Daniel.
'I went to Sydney in my 20s with one of my best mates, who strangely enough is half Australian and half from Sheffield. Back then it was all hostel beds and bars and beaches … I didn't remember much. So it was really nice to go back and get a real idea of the place. It's a wonderful city.'
Talking of nostalgia and lost love revisited, it would be remiss to interview Sturgess in 2025 without mentioning One Day. Last year Netflix scored a huge hit with their series adaptation of the David Nicholls comedy-romance, but it was Sturgess who played Dexter in the original 2011 film opposite Anne Hathaway.
'It was actually really nice for me to watch One Day,' he says. 'I'd just worked with Ambika Mod [who plays Emma in the Netflix series] on another TV show that we did for Disney [ The Stolen Girl ] and I was grateful for our friendship because it gave me a personal connection to this new version of One Day that was coming out. It was very nostalgic for me. But I just felt happy for them. They were having their time and we had ours. It was a special time in my life, making that film.'
That's the thing with the past. You can't change it. But you can still wallow in the memories and the what-ifs. Now go dig out that old mixtape and see where it takes you.