‘I wish I'd enjoyed my fame a bit more': Jim Sturgess on regrets, romance and the art of the mix tape

The Guardian

2 days ago

Like all good love stories, this one starts with a chance meeting and ends with a reunion. It was 2008, pre-Hardy and Hiddleston, post-Bale and Grant; Jim Sturgess was a rising star and the latest handsome young Brit to break Hollywood. Having landed the lead role in casino thriller 21, Sturgess needed a love interest: cue a slew of chemistry tests with a roll call of beautiful young women, a process Sturgess remembers now as 'the most exposed blind date you could ever possibly put yourself through, with five producers watching you from afar'.
Kate Bosworth got the role, but one actor lingered in Sturgess's mind: an effervescent Australian called Teresa Palmer. 'When you do those chemistry tests, they put you through it, so we spent the whole day together,' Sturgess says. 'I was really hoping she was going to get the part, because we got on really well. She's Australian, I'm English, and we were both in Hollywood going, 'Where the hell are we?''
Palmer didn't get the part, but Sturgess never forgot her. And, almost 20 years later, Sturgess and Palmer have been reunited – for Mix Tape, a wistful romantic drama about two people who reunite after 20 years apart.
Told in four one-hour episodes (you'll wish it was much, much longer), Mix Tape follows two teenagers, Dan and Alison, as they woo each other with letters and mix tapes in 1980s Sheffield (which means we get some amazing needle drops: the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Cure, Joy Division). Guileless young Dan (Rory Walton-Smith) is completely smitten, but Alison (Florence Hunt) is guarded, desperately trying to hide her difficult family life at home. When she suddenly disappears – for reasons revealed much later – Dan is completely heartbroken.
Sturgess, now 47, plays adult Dan: a music journalist who never left his home town and, despite being married, never really moved on from his first love. When he discovers Alison (Palmer) is now a bestselling author living in Sydney, he sends her a friend request online. Letters and cassettes are swapped for Facebook messages and Spotify playlists, but the feelings remain the same.
Palmer tells me Sturgess is 'the kindest, warmest, coolest, most effortless actor I've ever worked with. And that dude really has great taste in music,' she adds. 'He is that character – he is the real deal.' Before filming even began, Sturgess and Palmer were sending each other playlists, with Sturgess putting her on to UK rappers like Kano, Dizzee Rascal, Ocean Wisdom, Little Simz. 'It was just like the show,' he says. 'Twenty-odd years later, we were reconnecting.'
In his 20s, Sturgess made his name as the romantic lead in the Beatles musical film Across the Universe and opposite Anne Hathaway in One Day, but he has spent the past few years in roles that require guns and running – think Hard Sun and Geostorm. But Sturgess is made for this work, with his crinkly eyed smile and soft eyes. Last year was all about 'rodent boyfriends' – well, you can take your Mike Faist, because Sturgess is the OG rodent boyfriend, with a face particularly suited for yearning.
'I've been working on my yearning,' he laughs. 'I'm actually very attracted to romance stories, more so as I get older. They're just so human – it's literally two people navigating their feelings and their emotions, which is really beautiful and interesting.'
Mix tapes were a 'big, big part' of how Sturgess wooed girls. 'It works!' he laughs. 'A mix tape was a really big deal back then! That was why I was so attracted to young Daniel – I was that guy!' As a teenager, he was obsessed with US hip-hop and guitar bands from Northern England; he vividly recalls listening to the Stone Roses on his Walkman while delivering newspapers. 'That's what's so beautiful about Mix Tape – it is about that period when you first fall in love, when you first hear music,' he says. 'Your receptors are just so wide open and everything is so important to you. And that's why, when people ask you what your favourite band is, you'll probably say what your favourite band was when you were 16.'
Sturgess had a hand in choosing the music used in Mix Tape and even taught Walton-Smith and Hunt how to make mix tapes on cassette: 'It blew their minds. They were like, 'This is an art form. And this is a lot of work!'' he laughs. 'I was explaining to them how you couldn't just get the music off the internet – you had to own it, all your mix tapes came from what was in your collection. They couldn't believe it.'
Director Lucy Gaffy let Sturgess in on the audition process for young Dan; they picked Walton-Smith, a complete newcomer who will be in everything soon. 'There was a real gentleness to Rory that some of the other actors didn't bring,' says Sturgess. 'He's got that natural Northern swagger and charm to him. And it was his first job! He was so wide open and desperate to learn. Beautifully inquisitive. He was brilliant. I'm really proud of what he's done.'
When Sturgess was his age, he was too afraid to ask for help: 'I was dropped in at the deep end.' He never formally trained as an actor, but he got the bug as a six-year-old when he was cast in a production of Wind in the Willows. 'I was not very good at school. I struggled to concentrate … I was slightly tarnished with the naughty brush. But I just took to [acting]. I still remember the sense of community, of making something together – which I still crave now.'
When he was cast opposite Evan Rachel Wood in Across the Universe, Sturgess was propelled to international stardom. 'I didn't really know what I was doing. I was just a kid from England, playing in bands – and suddenly this movie thing happened. Everything changed quite quickly. I didn't really understand how to navigate myself through all that. I didn't have anybody guiding me. I'd be invited to these big parties, but I would always not go. It was a bit scary, it feels a bit mad.'
Over the years, he's been in the very good (Cloud Atlas), the worthy of reappraisal (Across the Universe – 'I feel like if it came out now, it might have done all right,' Sturgess muses), and the very bad (London Fields, a spectacular box office flop overshadowed by the subsequent tawdry trial between his co-stars, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard). He's passed on some big opportunities (playing Spider-Man on Broadway) and said yes to much smaller parts that made him happy. If anything, he's learned to focus on the experience of making something, rather than the reception: 'It's such a rollercoaster ride … If your end goal is just to have it be well received and get all the admiration that might come with that, you're going to fall over a lot. You're going to trip yourself up. If it is well received, that's the icing on the cake. I don't really read reviews. I just don't. I'm not trying to hide from them or anything. I'm just never that interested. If I read a bad one, I'll probably agree, you know? Fair enough!'
At the premiere for that casino film 21, which was held in Las Vegas, he remembers his face was plastered across billboards on the Strip, on the blackjack tables at the hotel and even on his room key. What is his relationship with fame now? 'It is easier,' he says. 'I was definitely more famous when I was younger and, sometimes, I wish I'd enjoyed it a bit more. But I shied away from fame a lot. I had it at an arm's length. And, looking back, I think I would have got more out of it if I opened myself up to it and embraced it, if I wasn't quite so wary of it all.' Now, he is recognised 'just enough that I'm quite flattered when it happens'.
These days, Sturgess is performing music under the moniker King Curious and his next film will be 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank, alongside Liam Neeson and – you guessed it– Teresa Palmer, who plays his girlfriend again. Is this what they're doing now, a la Fred and Ginger, Kate and Leo, Hanks and Ryan? Sturgess laughs. 'If you could just find somebody you got on with and kept making relationship movies … well, I'd be down!'
Mix Tape is on BBC Two and iPlayer