Sturgess has new Cross to bear

niche, interesting work, but it also means he has, at times, been overlooked in favour of a more famous face with a huge following. ‘‘I’ve been cast and then moved on for a bigger name – twice a director has cast me in a film we’re about to shoot and I’ve been replaced.’’

He is a reluctant Instagrammer, and has encountered an astonishing amount of racism on his account, when he has posted pictures of his girlfriend, who is Iraqi. ‘‘It’s a safe zone to be as horrible as you can be, but I don’t take offence to it,’’ he says.

If he had it his way, he would make great music, films and TV shows, with no thought at all as to how it might enhance his brand. ‘‘I think I realised quite quickly that [fame] wasn’t that important to me. It was all about being involved in something creative that was exciting.’’

Lately, he admits, finding the energy and inspiration to throw at any creative project at all has been difficult. If he seems philosophical when talking about Hard Sun, and the way he and Deyn grappled with the concept of the world ending, it’s because he has had more cause than most to consider important things in life in the past couple of years.

He won’t go into details, only to say that losing people ‘‘through death and through break-up’’ four years ago plunged him into a particularly dark period.

‘‘It was a really difficult time,’’ he says, staring at the rain battering the windowpane. ‘‘It’s hard to work when you’re in a very emotional, raw place. A lot of people say you can use that but actually when you’re in it, you can’t. It’s paralysing. So actually acting was quite a struggle.’’

Time, the support of friends and family, and falling in love again all helped him get back on track, he says.

‘‘London used to be a lot of painful memories and now it’s become invigorating again. Hard Sun came at exactly the right time where I wanted to work and get really involved in something and I didn’t want to leave. The Hard Sun concept puts things weirdly in perspective.’’

In four months he’ll turn 40, almost classing him as a veteran in acting terms. He is approaching it, he says, with a sense of peace and contentment he hasn’t experienced for some time.

‘‘My lifestyle in the past two years has really changed. You can’t smoke a packet of cigarettes all day at work. You can’t go out boozing all the time. It just hurts.

‘‘Because I went quite low, I now have a huge appreciation for feeling good again and what it means to feel good.

‘‘You can get quite complacent about your life, and it’s not until you suffer trauma, and people that you thought were going to be around are no longer around, that you get a really euphoric sense of life.’’ – The Daily Telegraph

begins screening on Sky TV’s SoHo channel on Sunday, February 4, at 8.30pm.