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.
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