Jim Sturgess: a thoroughly polished survivor

You need only look at what An Education did for an unknown Carey Mulligan to see where Jim Sturgess might be headed. In 2011 he stars in the new film from Lone Scherfig, director of An Education. One Day is already being talked-up as a dead cert repeat of the award-magnet formula: adaptation of a smart, funny, much-loved Brit lit (in this case, David Nicholls's novel), with a star-making turn by a box-fresh young English actor. It's just one of a handful of top-drawer films Sturgess has trickling out: next up is the Boxing Day biggie, The Way Back, in which he lines up alongside Ed Harris and Colin Farrell as prisoners breaking out of a Russian gulag during the second world war.

The funny thing about Sturgess, now 29, is that he has already had a crack at the big time – a couple of years ago. It  just wasn't to his liking. Rewind to 2007 when director Julie Taymor gave him an almighty break, as a mop-haired Liverpool shipyard worker in her sweetly uncynical Beatles-inspired musical, Across the Universe. Teenage girls in America were hopelessly devoted to the movie and for about five minutes Sturgess was the hot young Brit actor du jour – dish of the day. He thought he'd come home after shooting and life as an out-of-work actor would get back to normal. "But I had an American agent, and suddenly you're getting invited into this Hollywood world." He made a further two films almost immediately: The Other Boleyn Girl and 21, with Kevin Spacey. At this point the cheesy high school scripts were piling in, then came the golden ticket: he was offered the lead in the Spider-Man musical, directed by Taymor and with music written by Bono and the Edge from U2, which opens in February on Broadway.

Sturgess turned it all down. Why? Because none of it felt right. Which could sound a mite pretentious, but he tells the story matter-of-factly. "It was when 21 came out. I was in Los Angeles and my face was everywhere: on buses, on posters, on the side of buildings." Something didn't connect he says. "I didn't feel that blown away by it. I was still hungry to prove myself. I realised that quite quickly, that I had to find something that challenged me from an acting point of view." So instead of donning a superhero cape he made two British films that, as he says himself, got a bit lost: the IRA drama Fifty Dead Men Walking and Philip Ridley's East End gothic-horror Heartless.

Surely the lure of Hollywood pay cheques must have been tempting? "Certainly after 21 I was getting the opportunity to make a lot of money." Not that tempting, if he went and made Heartless instead? Sturgess cracks up. "Which I got paid nothing for. The budget of the entire film would probably have been my fee for the others."

The Way Back, though, is presumably exactly the kind of challenge he had in mind when he turned down the vampire-ate-my-boyfriend scripts. Directed by Peter Weir (his first film in seven years), it is an epic struggle for survival, with the escaped prisoners trekking a gruelling 4,500 miles to freedom: from frozen Siberia into Mongolia, across the Gobi desert, China and over the Himalayas. Final destination: India. Sturgess is a kind Polish officer, wrongly imprisoned for spying, whose boy scout know-how makes him an unlikely de facto leader.

He says he spent six months "fretting and waiting" before the shoot, powering through as many books as Weir could throw at him. He met Polish gulag survivors, learned how to skin rabbits and sundry survival skills that don't come naturally if you're from Farnham, Surrey. Is he outsdoorsy? "I'm more of a city person." He also had to lose weight – a stone came off before Weir gently reminded him he needed to look like he might survive. All told, he says he was over-ready when he turned up at the start of the four-month shoot. "I was wound tight. I felt the entire Polish history sitting on my shoulder – and I had to give it in one stare." Big grin. Filming started in Bulgaria, standing in for snowy Siberia.

His first couple of scenes are in Polish and for a minute or two it looks like he has done a Meryl Streep (who learned Polish to make Sophie's Choice). But, no, his character is arrested precisely because he knows foreign languages and the rest of the film is in English, which Sturgess speaks with an accent. (The "accent of doom" he says. "No one pulls one off.") Actually he's pretty convincing. Harris plays an American while Farrell is a Russian career criminal with a tattoo of Stalin on his chest and a murderous snarl. ("Less use than dog," he growls when their party picks up a waif-and-stray Polish girl.)

Weir nearly abandoned the film altogether when he heard about the real-or-fake controversy swirling around the book it's based on: The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz. The publicity material politely describes it as a novel, but it was published in 1956 as a memoir. Later, a Radio 4 documentary unearthed proof that Rawicz could not have escaped the gulag because he'd been freed by an amnesty. Now it's thought he might have hijacked another man's story. Sturgess says Weir did his own investigation, and found evidence that men had escaped from Siberia and made their way over the Himalayas. "He was so thrilled when he found that out, because he was like: now I can tell a fictional story but know that it happened. Everything he filled in was based on fact."

Sturgess first started acting in primary school – to the relief of his parents, happy he was concentrating on something, anything. By the time he was a teenager he was more interested in playing in bands, gigging at local pubs from 15 – "I looked about 13." After graduating with a media and performance degree at the University of Salford, he moved to London to act. He  worked in a trainer shop in the West End of London until the drum'n'bass over the shop's PA started messing with his audition monologues. "It just sort of drilled all my lines out of me." He wound up in a band that spent four years nurturing their sound, picking up some music industry interest before imploding."Basically we blew it." On  rock'n'roll-style hard living? "A bit of that, yeah. We were totally obnoxious. We thought we could control the situation and we couldn't. But we were close. So close." Now the idea of their fates being sealed with a record deal gives him the terrors. "I sweat about that a lot. I'm so glad it didn't happen." He still dabbles and his girlfriend plays keyboards with La Roux.

It was Sturgess's way around a guitar that got him his big break – that and the moptoppish looks. He auditioned for Across the Universe a month after his band broke up, unfazed by its premise: a 1960s-set musical about star-crossed lovers told through the medium of 33 Beatles songs. He played a young Liverpool welder who works his way to New York on a ship, and falls in love with an American girl (Evan Rachel Wood). It was a love-it-or-loathe-it film. "Joyous," wrote veteran critic Roger Ebert. "Idiotic," reckoned the Guardian.

But his upcoming projects will surely be generating smiles all around: One Day and a love story with Kirsten Dunst. He  was meant to be working with Michael Winterbottom next, on a film set in the run-up to the partition of Palestine in 1948. But – and no surprise here – it has hit funding problems. Now, his people must have been telling him to steer clear of this one? "I was hugely advised to not go down that road."

And what of that Spider-Man musical? "I just didn't fancy being strung up, hanging for 10 minutes above the audience," Sturgess says. He admits he had nagging doubts. Musical theatre just isn't his bag and he was nervous about spending a year singing someone else's songs – even Bono's. Instead, why not let Taymor give another actor the kind of life-changing opportunity she had given him with Across the Universe. "It just wasn't my calling." Really, wasn't it all just a bit too commercial? He gives in with another huge grin: "Yes. I didn't want the words Spider-Man attached to my name in any shape or form. Especially a singing one."

The Way Back is reviewed in page 9.