After finishing his Lyle & Scott photoshoot, Tom Sturridge tentatively suggests a trip to the pub. It is lunchtime, the London-born actor was out the previous night and he is hung over. A boozer is located. He drinks Guinness (three and a half pints), smokes cigarettes (Camels) and eats crisps (ready salted). His biggest role to date was that of pretty teenage ingénue Carl in Richard Curtis’s The Boat That Rocked, but today, his beard and ample body hair (glimpsed while changing sweaters) make him more like a very skinny version of the Joy of Sex bloke.
We are supposed to talk about fashion. But, “I’ll warn you now,” he says, “my knowledge of clothes is very low.” It can’t be that low, though, because by anyone’s standard Sturridge’s wardrobe is tidily put together: skinny jeans, leather boots, pork-pie hat. He squirms. “My younger brother is far more sophisticated than I am. All my clothes I’ve just thieved from him. I just copy him.”
Sturridge, 25, does self-depreciation to the point of perversion. “I’m about to start doing a film, which is incredibly rare for me,” he says. “I’ve spent much more of my professional life not working than working.”
He is a strange mix. Confident, articulate and inquisitive, he can also sometimes come across as cynical, awkward and defensive. He is the son of director Charles Sturridge and actress Phoebe Nicholls (the two met when working on Brideshead Revisited) and was educated at the Harrodian School and Winchester College, but quit before sitting his A levels. He has just finished filming an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road with Kirsten Dunst and Sam Riley. He refuses, point blank, to talk about his girlfriend, Sienna Miller, or Robert Pattinson, his childhood friend.
“When you agree to be interviewed, it’s an opportunity to reveal your own moronic-ness,” he says. “It’s OK if I come across as a complete idiot, but it’s not fair for me to describe or refer to anyone else. Anyone can be tainted by my mention of them.”
Paparazzi attention, when with Miller, “is something that happens so occasionally that it doesn’t affect me remotely. I know there are people that it happens to all the time, though.”
It was, as it happened, Sturridge being papped in a Lyle & Scott jumper that got him this modelling gig. He says he doesn’t mind posing. “It’s not my job, so people don’t expect much of me, If you’re a model and then you’re s*** at having your photograph taken, people get pissed off. But I just do what I can.”
He drains his glass. “Now,” he says, flashing me a smile that would skewer any casting director, “do you think The Times would buy me one more Guinness?”
Magscans Suffolk17 via RPLife via Robstenation
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