Earlier this week, I and others sat down for a short talk with 23-year-old British actor Tom Sturridge, who plays the central character in Pirate Radio,
opening this weekend. Though he grew up around show business, Sturridge has so far only appeared in a handful of films, including 2004's Being Juilia and Vanity Fair.
(You can read my Q&A with Pirate Radio director Richard Curtis here.)
The following are some highlights from our chat with Sturridge:
On Being the Child of Filmmaker Charles Sturridge and Actress Phoebe Nicholls
Sturridge: In a weird way, it was kind of the opposite of a show-business childhood. I was a very clichéd, rebellious child, and I really didn’t want to have anything to do with what they did. I didn’t see my mom in a play until about a year and a half ago for the first time. There was no sort of fracture on any side of our relationships, but I wasn’t somebody who spent time on sets. I did a film when I was seven, Gulliver’s Travels directed by my dad, which was more due to the fact that he was out of the country and wanted a way for his son to be with him and so he put me in it. I wouldn’t really call that acting, I’d call it standing.
And so it wasn’t until when I was 17, when they were casting Being Julia that I got involved in the business. I was quite a big cinephile when I was a kid, and I really wanted to meet the film’s director, Istvan Szabo. And the casting director was my friend’s mother and she kinda showed him all the professional 17-year-old actors, and he didn’t like any of them. So after that the only other 17-year-old boys she knew were her family friends. And so she started getting them in, and I really wanted to meet Istvan. It was that experience meeting him and by chance getting the job and the experience of making the film that got me into acting more than anything.
On How Twenty-Somethings Today Feel About the Sixties
Sturridge: I think every contemporary band and musician has in some way been influenced or is referencing music that began in the ‘60s in the same way that the Stones were referencing the blues. It’s not an alien idea, this music—unlike any other period, it still abounds in our culture: Beatles music, Rolling Stones music, The Who, especially in England. You can’t watch a film or a TV advert or a television program without listening to them.
My dad gave me his record collection when I was younger, so I was very familiar with the music. The story itself, the idea of pirate radio and what was happening on these boats, I was completely ignorant of, and learned about when I read the script. But in England, it’s so pervasive, this music, that you can’t not know it. Richard Curtis has a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of pop music from 1956 to the present day so it was an education because he would bring out weird B sides everyday that no one had ever heard of.
What’s amazing about it, I think, which is very different from being young now, is how the music of the ‘60s was born of an energy created by this postwar conservatism, and young people not having a framework to express how they feel. Especially in England, the ‘50s were very, very repressed; people were recovering from what had happened in World War II. You didn’t tell your mother what you felt about love and sex and how to live, and so this kind of energy built up that exploded with this music, and I think that’s something that any young person can empathize with.
On Working with More Experienced Actors
Sturridge: It’s just about observing people’s behavior. There was no moment when Bill Nighy sat me down on his lap and said, “Let me tell you how to live, boy.” I think it’s very rare nowadays you can ascribe the word “dignified” to an actor, and this film was particularly littered with dignified men—Philip and Bill and Richard—and it was just amazing to spend every day in a room with people you want to grow up to be like. It was obviously intimidating, but we had a period of four days where we slept and lived on the boat. You can’t help but kind of stop seeing people as movie stars and begin to see them as kind of the broken, fragile human beings they really are when you have breakfast with them every day.
What was very different on Pirate Radio was the fact that this was shot the majority of the time with two, maybe even three cameras, all of which were hand-held. So basically the camera was an autonomous being because it could go anywhere, and the camera operator would make a decision about what he felt was the most interesting thing going on in the room at the time. Which meant that it was constantly alive, which it had to be when you have seven principle actors in a room. You can’t just do “close-up, wide, two shot” because it would take four years to get through a scene. Normally, you start with a wide shot and you get closer and closer until you’re close up and hope you do your best acting and all that crap. This was a much more liberating way of doing it.
So it was, in a weird way, kind of like theater because you never knew when you were on or off—in the same way an audience watching a play can edit it in their mind by deciding whom to watch. That’s what was happening live at the time on the set. It was exciting, and specifically so because you had these great comic egos trying to out-compete each other, in a totally playful way, in order to seduce the camera. It was amazing to watch.
As for my someday playing a wilder character like Philip and Rhys Ifans did, I think you always want to do different things. That’s the only way to sustain any kind of career. But I loved the fact that on Pirate Radio I was the voyeur. It was really satisfying to be able to go into work everyday and your job is to react as honestly as you could to the amazing things that these guys were doing, both scripted and unscripted. It was just my job to kind of be the audience and relish it, fear it, laugh at it as it happened.
On the Differences Between British and American TV and Films
Sturridge: I think the difference is much more connected to geography and the size of the industries. When America makes a television program, it has to appeal to a much wider audience from very different social, economic backgrounds and therefore has to be popular because that’s how television survives. So unfortunately I think sometimes it has to appease the masses, so you have to be slightly gentler with the way you present material. Whereas in England, it’s just a smaller country, and the industry is so much smaller that you have to have a certain amount of people to watch your program. So we’re not as tied to mass culture. But there’s just as much s#!t on British TV as there is on American TV, trust me. We sit at home watching Mad Men and The Wire and thinking that America is the god of culture. I think America definitely makes the best television in the world, like Generation Kill, all that stuff. As for maybe working in TV, the scary thing about it is the commitment is so much longer. I don’t know anybody in any walk of life kind of knows where they want to be in eight years’ time.
It sounds really stupid, but in the old days to be in American film or television, you had to come to America. Now simply because of things like the Internet, you can audition for American films and parts and email it to them. I genuinely think that it means now when someone’s casting an American film, they might as well call up an English casting director and say, “send me who you think are the best English actors” just ‘cause it’s so easy. They don’t have to pay to fly anyone out, and I think people are getting more opportunities just because you go up for more parts. I think it’s a myth that British actors are more professional or polished. You go to LA and literally everyone is an actor and everyone from every corner of the globe has come there, and I think you find talent and professionalism in all of them. You just kind of hope that the quality rises to the top of the bath. For example, it seems like every leading actor at the moment is Australian.
On Recently Appearing in His First Play, Punk Rock, and His Future Plans
Sturridge: I just finished Punk Rock last week. It was amazing. I’ve never done a play before. I didn’t do acting at school, I didn’t go to drama school, so it was a totally new experience, and deeply fulfilling. The play is about a school shooting. It’s totally opposite of Pirate Radio—it’s very dark, about a boy suffering from schizophrenia who eventually decides to kill all his friends.
But it’s a really weird thing. I was quite snobbish about theater and I didn’t really enjoy it. I always had felt really disconnected from it, and so I hadn’t gone up for a lot parts in theater. But then suddenly to do it and realize how wrong I was, and to realize that there’s another avenue or way you can live your life as an actor. It doesn’t have to be coming to America and trying to be in film. You can probably live a more satisfying existence standing onstage in London. I’d definitely do more theater. I just had a shockingly amazing, sort of revelatory experience doing it.
I really don’t have a career plan, not remotely. The only thing I think you can usefully aspire to do is to work with people who are cleverer than you are, which I think in my case is relatively easy. Literally there are thousands of filmmakers I’d like to work with. In England, there’s Andrea Arnold who made Fish Tank—it was amazing. I really want to see the new Michael Haneke film The White Ribbon. And in America, Paul Thomas Anderson is pretty much the king. In any walk of life, the way to sustain a career or even your mind is to hang out with people who are thinking all the time and trying to make things that are good. That could be in London or Los Angeles or Uzbekistan—I just want to work with clever people.
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