Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Tom Sturridge is probably a name most of you are not familiar with. Hell, I wasn't until I saw writer-director Richard Curtis' PIRATE RADIO (a.k.a. THE BOAT THAT ROCKED), and I'd actually unknowingly seen some of his previous work, including supporting roles in FAIRY TALE: A TRUE STORY; VANITY FAIR, directed by Mira Nair; BEING JULIA, opposite Annette Bening; and LIKE MIND, opposite Toni Collette. His father is the acclaimed British director Charles Sturridge, who directed the original "Brideshead Revisited" mini-series, as well as the films A HANDFUL OF DUST, WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD, the aforementioned FAIRY TALE, SHACKLETON, and three episodes of the exceptional HBO series "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency."
The younger Sturridge plays Carl, a moderately innocent young lad who is foisted upon a boat filled with deviant DJs in 1960s Britain (or more specifically, the North Sea off the coast of Britain). Carl is our eyes and ears. He's discovered the sights and especially sounds of Radio Rock, a pirate radio station pumping the greatest rock and R&B tunes into the country because the BBC won't do it. In real life, they were celebrities, they were heroes, they were doing God's work, and the film is a tribute to the men who introduced their countrymen to these great songs. And in PIRATE RADIO, Carl has a front-row seat to all the festivities. And according to the press, he's best buddies with TWILIGHT's Robert Pattinson, something I did not bring up because I don't give a shit. That said, I think that Tom Sturridge does a solid job in PIRATE RADIO, and he's about as nice a man of 24 as you're likely to meet. The experience of making this movie with all of these great talents clearly had an impact on him, and he seems utterly grateful just to have been a part of the whole experience. Please enjoy the up-and-coming Tom Sturridge…
Capone: I noticed that you've got a movie called WAITING FOR FOREVER coming out with Jaime King. I just came from a set visit for a movie she's starring in, and we talked about WAITING FOR FOREVER a bit.
Tom Sturridge: She’s amazing.
Capone: Your two characters have the same last name. Are you brother and sister or husband and wife?
TS: She plays my brother’s wife.
Capone: Oh, okay. I do want to talk about that in a minute. But let's talk about PIRATE RADIO first. A lesser man might have been intimidated by the caliber of people that you got to work with on this film.
TS: I am that lesser man.
[Both laugh]
Capone: Did it take some getting used to, though?
TS: Completely and in a very simple way, they were people who I had admired and respected and grown up watching, so it was intimidating. Fortunately, my character was a boy who was sent to live amongst people who would have intimidated him, who were his heroes at the time and, therefore, anything I was feeling was apt and useful.
Capone: Do you remember anyone doing anything or saying anything that kind of made you realize you were one of this group of guys who just wanted to make a great movie, and there was no caste system.
TS: The fundamental moment I remember was on the second weekend, we were out at a kind of bar in Weymouth where we were shooting, and for reasons I still don’t understand I got thrown out of the bar and I remember Rhys Ifans charged out and put his arm around me and said “If you can’t drink in there, then I won’t drink in there,” and took me somewhere else. That’s when I felt at ease.
Capone: The scene near the beginning where Philip Seymour Hoffman kind of pulls you into the broadcast booth, and I think hugs you, and then as you are turned away he kind of slaps your ass. Was there a hint of a surprised look on your face when he did that?
TS: That was genuinely the first time I met Philip. We had been shooting going on three weeks or something and he arrived and so he hadn’t been part of the preparation process. Not that late, but just late enough to when we all had sort of slowly bonded. And I remember that day he was shooting first, and I turned up at lunch time or something, and so we still hadn’t had that morning introduction where I’m sure everyone bowed down and went to look for his Oscar and stuff in his dressing room.
Capone: Does he travel with it?
TS: I think some people were hoping he did. But they were shooting a scene, and I wasn’t supposed to be in that scene, and they were just shooting a little bit of him DJing and Richard [Curtis] decided as I came on set in costume, and he just said “Why don’t you go in and take him a cup of tea while we are shooting?” So literally it was the first moment I met him, and I remember sort of giving him the cup of tea and he shakes my hand or something, and I turn around to go towards the door and in my head I was going “Fuck, I’ve just done my first scene with Philip Seymour Hoffman; this is amazing.” Suddenly I heard this kind of [deep scruffy voice] “Carl!” I was holding the door handle and suddenly just going “Shit, I’m about to improvise with Philip Seymour Hoffman,” and then he turned around and did the slap on the ass thing, and that’s the smile of Tom Sturridge’s surprise and delight.
Capone: Just watching all of these guys though, what do you remember admiring about the way that they worked individually? Obviously they all work differently.
TS: It’s difficult. I think acting is such a kind of intangible job. It’s very difficult to articulate what you do and very specifically what other people do and so it was more… I learned more of how they behaved as people off set, and, I don’t know, Bill Nighy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Nick Frost are the kind of people you want to be when you grow up. It’s rare when you can ascribe the word “Dignity” to an actor. Do you know what I mean? They are dignified men and it was just learning how to be a grown up was my abiding memory as opposed to how they did their stuff, because they did it very differently and very personally in the same way that everybody does their thing.
It’s quite rare when you have a film where there are seven or eight principle characters in the room at the same time, and I suppose what was interesting was seeing how people managed that. The way it was shot was hand held and a lot of the time with two or three cameras going, and so no one knew if it was their moment, because the cameras would just follow what they were most interested in, which meant that it was fascinating to see comic egos battling it out to try to essentially seduce the camera operator into turning towards them. [Laughs] Fortunately my job was just to be a voyeur of everybody.
Capone: You really are the audience’s entry into this world, and that’s a lovely sort of extra burden put on your shoulders--to take us to the right places and ask the right questions. Did that even enter your mind while you were making it? The audience is looking at it all through you.
TS: Because of that I was put in a very relaxing position, because it was just like swimming in it. I just kind of sat back and reacted to whatever extraordinary things everybody was doing, which was really a pleasurable experience.
Capone: In addition to being an acting education, was this experience also a music education for you, or did you kind of know this music already?
TS: You have to grow up in a basement to not know The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and stuff, but Richard has a kind of freakish, encyclopedic knowledge of every piece of pop music from 1956 to the present day and so he couldn’t help but educate everyone.
Capone: Were you even familiar with the pirate radio phenomenon growing up? Were you shocked that this even happened?
TS: I had absolutely no idea about it, especially being a young person now and my relationship with music is so much about how easily accessible it is. I can listen to any type of music on the internet in moments, be it a girl in New Zealand playing the guitar in her bedroom or a new Radiohead album or whatever, whereas the idea that young people found it difficult to find the music they love is kind of completely alien.
Capone: And not just young people, according to the movie, it’s just about every age was listening to these stations. It was all they really had. I assume you auditioned for this part, what do you remember about that process?
TS: It was long. I auditioned maybe four times and the thing that obviously differentiates me from everyone in that picture basically is that they were all asked to be in it, and I had to persuade them. It was the same as every audition process--as you get closer you look at things in more detail, and I think it was just getting to know Richard and I don’t think I have really ever auditioned more for anything than I did for this. The last of which I basically did every scene in the film in a small theater with somebody filming me, and we pretty much read everything which was something I’ve never done before, but it was great.
Capone: Probably the only thing you and I have in common is I have also been in a bathroom with Nick Frost, but not naked. The last time he was here with HOT FUZZ, the hotel or somebody sent him a birthday cake…
TS: And he put the cake in the toilet?
Capone: Yeah.
TS: I have heard it from him where at every hotel they are at, Nick has to put cake in his toilet or something. I think there’s a website with photographs of cakes in different toilets all across the world.
Capone: That scene of the two of you naked in the bathroom had to be either terrifying or liberating or both.
TS: Listen, it’s a beautiful thing to stand naked in front of Nick Frost and embrace him and feel his stomach hairs against your chest [laughs]. But I don’t think anyone can say that they are completely confident in taking their clothes off in front of a bunch of people, but it was fun and Nick is such an easy person to feel safe around and we just had a great time. If anything, the difficult thing about it was it was a tiny little room, and so we literally were scrunched up between each other.
Capone: The whole film seemed like it was set in a series of tiny little rooms. How much of the movie did you actually shoot on the boat?
TS: It was 50-50, with six weeks on the boat and six weeks in the studio.
Capone: Did the boat come first or the studio?
TS: The studio came first, but the first thing we did, was everybody lived on the boat for four days. That was when everyone acclimated with each other. I mean, we did shoot a lot of it on the boat, and it’s stupid, but you don’t have to fake it when the water is moving and you are falling over a little bit and bustling through small corridors and sitting in tiny bedrooms and trying to work our way through.
Capone: Speaking of Nick, I actually own the DVD of THE BOAT THAT ROCKS, so I have seen all of the deleted scenes. The scene where he is cracking eggs over your head borders on cruelty. There’s really no other way to describe it.
TS: When they cut that out of the film, I mean, we literally shot that for a day. It was a difficult experience, and I think one of the reasons they took it out, was because he does kind of come across as quite an evil man. Apparently egg yoke is good for your hair, so…
Capone: That’s what Richard says on the introduction to that scene on the DVS is that your hair has been shiny and bouncy ever since.
TS: It was. It was beautiful.
Capone: Did you get a sense while you were shooting this that you were kind of just playing a part of Richard’s rock and roll fantasy world?
TS: Completely. Some people are reacting to the film and are kind of like “That never happened on Radio Caroline,” which I think is just totally ridiculous. My notion, and I think Richard will agree with this, when we were working on it and before was that Richard listened to these radio stations when he was a child. That boy at the beginning, when he switches on his radio, that was Richard, and this film is his childhood fantasy of what was going on at the other end of that transistor radio. It’s not in any way supposed to be a historical representation of Radio Caroline. It’s about a young person’s dream of crazy, magical, foolish things, which were going on between his heroes. The reality of it was they were a bunch of grumpy men sitting on a boat getting a bit ill for six months and playing the best music in the world, but when people go like “God, they never had girls on the boat!” and stuff like that, it’s like, come on…
Capone: I didn’t know if it was accurate or not; it doesn’t matter. It feels like this is the inside of someone’s head with the greatest soundtrack ever made. I feel the same way about something like AMERICAN GRAFFITI or ALMOST FAMOUS, but it doesn’t matter if that’s what happened, that’s kind of how they remember it, and that’s the beauty of it. Do you remember any other scenes where you were just like “I can’t believe that didn’t make it"?
TS: Not so much scenes I was in. There was basically more… I think the first cut of this film was like six hours long.
[Both Laugh]
Capone: The number keeps growing every time I hear about it. It’s gone from three to four to six hours
TS: There was a rumor, which is almost definitely not true, that while they had just finished shooting THE DARK KNIGHT, and some of the people who were developing the film were picking up the film everyday from set, and there was a rumor that we had shot more rolls of film than THE DARK KNIGHT. I think that was just the joke that everyone was making, but there was so much.
Capone: So was there anything in particular?
TS: I remember there was a sequence of the stag night, which some of it is in the English version I think, but that was kind of a really long… I remember we shot it in Soho, in London where I used to live, and it was really fun doing something in your streets and working outside of your front door. I was just really nostalgic about it.
Capone: That’s the scene that is expanded in the outtakes to show when they go to Abbey Road and Phil Hoffman gives a phenomenal speech about the Beatles that is my favorite of all of the outtakes.
TS: It’s a beautiful speech. It’s so sad that it got cut.
Capone: And knowing what Richard thinks of the Beatles, I can’t believe he took it out, but I’m glad it’s there and I got to see it. Talk about how working on this film sort of sharpened your improvisational skills, because it didn’t really seem like you had any choice if you wanted to keep up.
TS: Yeah, completely. The way it was done… It was obviously very clearly scripted--it is Richard Curtis--but the moment the scene had finished, we would just carry on, and so basically you always felt in a safe position because you had done six minutes of a scene from the script, so you knew were you were going. It wasn’t like he put us in a room and said “Be funny” or “Make sure that we understand that he loves her.” We came from a strong, solid position and then people would just riff and like I was saying before, because I’m like the eyes, it was really easy to just enjoy the experience. I never felt like I had to be a protagonist in this. Do you know what I mean?
Capone: Yeah. What did you think about having Emma Thompson playing your mother?
TS: That was great.
Capone: “Yes, please.”
TS: She was probably the person I was most terrified of, only because she only worked with me for a couple of days and she came halfway through the film and I didn’t have any time to acclimatize myself. It was literally “Bang. Let’s do this.” They were quite important scenes I think, but it was amazing working with her. She’s good. [laughs]
Capone: Was it strange when you finally saw whatever cut of the film you saw first, to see all of Kenneth Branagh’s scenes? You guys had nothing to do with that.
TS: They had shot that first, and it’s really weird. I got the feeling that they all felt a bit jealous, because everyone else was having the fun on the boat, and they kind of spent their two weeks pushing out the more serious aspect of it. But, it was good to see some of that and to watch something you have no idea what it is.
Capone: I wanted to talk a little bit more about Bill Nighy, because the man is practically royalty as far as I'm concerned.
TS: I feel like such an idiot on all of these interviews, because I am constantly saying how amazing it was to work with these people. But one of Richard's great talents is bringing together such an extraordinary group, and however he did it, secretly or not, allowing a synergy to form by creating the courteous atmosphere, which is about feeling safe and loved and okay to just do whatever you think the best thing to do in a situation and yeah, it was extraordinary working with Bill.
Capone: This film feels so different from everything else Richard has done before, because it’s not about relationships necessarily. It’s about a different kind of relationship. But the subject matter he's chosen makes it feel like his most personal film.
TS: There isn’t a figurehead to it who you put your heart into. There are different things happening all of the time, and people take different things from it and I think it is maybe one of his most personal films.
Capone: Tell me about what you’ve got coming up, aside from the one we talked about before, WAITING FOR FOREVER.
TS: In London, I just finished a play, which was the first play I have ever done. I just finished that like a week ago and I think that might be going somewhere else. I think that will be the next thing I do, and then WAITING FOR FOREVER comes out at Sundance.
Capone: I was going to ask you if it had any kind of release planned.
TS: I think it’s Sundance, although I haven’t spoken to the producers in a while.
Capone: You were saying before that you are taking the play somewhere else?
TS: Yeah. It has yet to be decided where.
Capone: What’s it called?
TS: It’s called PUNK ROCK. It’s about a school shooting. It’s been the most amazing experience of my life, because I didn’t go to drama school and I didn’t do acting at school and it was really weird to realize there’s a different way of living your life, doing theater. I think it was just a really good play.
Capone: So you don’t have another film lined up at this point?
TS: There are things, but I don’t believe literally, until you are at the wrap party of a film, over the last couple of years, the way the industry is, I don’t think you can say.
Capone: Who do you play in WAITING FOR FOREVER?
TS: Well, it’s about a homeless street performer who is kind of stalking a girl, not necessarily malevolently, but the film is about him revealing that he’s been doing this for years, and how they resolve that situation.
Capone: Who is the girl?
TS: Rachel Bilson. And Richard Jenkins is in it playing her father. Blythe Danner is in it. It was really a totally different experience from this, in that it was filmed in Utah and was very low budget. We shot it in like 21 days or something compared to [PIRATE RADIO] where at the end it was like 14 weeks. It was really difficult actually. It was one of those things where I remember waking up every morning looking at what I had to achieve in the day and not imagining being able to achieve it, which was strange but invigorating in the end.
Capone: Speaking of women, in PIRATE RADIO, what was it like on those days where there were women on the set? [Laughs]
TS: It was the most amazing thing and almost dangerous for them, because it was like them turning up at a prison, except we were not behind bars, and so we would attack the moment they arrived.
Capone: Attack with your charm, I hope.
[Both Laugh]
TS: Well sometimes and sometimes with other things, but it was brilliant. Gemma Arterton, Talulah Riley, Emma Thompson. It was a good group of women to have around.
Capone: I hope nobody attacked Emma Thompson.
TS: Emma Thompson can look after herself.
[Both Laugh]
Capone: Well, thank you so much. This was great.
TS: Thank you. It was really nice meeting you.
-- Capone
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