TRACKING THE KILLER AS THE WORLD ENDS

Jim Sturgess lights up the small screen in ‘Hard Sun’ By Ian Spelling

British detectives Robert Hicks and Elaine Renko dislike and distrust each other intensely, but the mismatched new partners find themselves immersed knee-deep in pre-apocalyptic intrigue when they discover, in the course of a murder investigation, that Earth will cease to exist in five years. The powers that be will do everything necessary to keep our impending doom a secret, lest the planet degenerate into chaos, so Hicks and Renko become targets who must rely on each other to stay alive.

Oh, and also there’s a serial killer on the loose. Such is the plot — or the first few strands — of

Hard Sun, a six-episode BBC/Hulu co-production from Neil Cross, the creator of the current BBC hit Luther. Jim Sturgess and Agyness Deyn play Hicks and Renko in the series, which will premiere March 7 in the United States on Hulu. Sturgess, the 39-year-old British actor/singer

best known for the films Across the Universe (2007) and One Day ( 2011), recently spoke about Hard

Sun by telephone from his London home. “It felt like something very different, something I’d not read before,” Sturgess said. “It felt like a detective drama, almost like a classic detective drama, when I first started reading it off the page, and then quite quickly it turned into something different. Once the concept of the end of the

world and this Hard Sun file gets discovered, you realise you’re going to go on a very different journey than a straight- down- the- line cop drama.

“I was drawn into it ver y quickly,” Sturgess said. “The introduction to the two characters that Neil wrote was really exciting. I thought ‘ Wow.’ He starts with a bit of a slap in the face for both characters. You don’t really like Hicks at the beginning, which was hugely appealing as an actor. “I didn’t know what I thought about him, either,” Sturgess continued. “But I thought it was quite an interesting place to start, because it means that there’s a lot to unravel and dig deep into and to discover as to why he’s making so many wrong- footed decisions and doing so many questionable things all the way through the experience.”

Tensions mount between Hicks and Renko. Hicks loves his family, but nevertheless cheats on his wife, with the wife of his late best friend and partner. Renko suspects that Hicks murdered the partner, and she’s actually investigating him for reasons that involve yet another personal, dramatic twist. All of the issues between the two escalate, early in the series, to an absolutely brutal, knock- down, drag- out fight. “The fight mirrored, in a physical way, the dynamics of their mental fight with each other,” Sturgess said. “So it’s something we’ve worked on a lot. It’s in the first episode, so straight away Agyness and I met each other and, within five minutes, we were rolling around on a stunt mat learning how to do this fight scene. “Filming it, and dealing with the logistics and choreography, it was a good way to get to know each other, actually,” he added. “And that scene, I will tell you, got edited down, as these things often do, just for time. It was a much longer, more graphic fight scene.” Sturgess went on to call Deyn “amazing” and explain that they “held on to each other for dear life” during production. Making the show was intense, with much of the filming taking place on the rain-soaked streets of London. According to Sturgess, neither had ever done anything like Hard Sun.

“Agyness and I, in a weird way, mirrored how Renko and Hicks feel in the show, because she really is the only person who knows what I went through making that show. We shared a bond, like the characters. We have a very similar attitude on set and a very similar presence and ease, so we got on really well, straight away.”

In real life the sun doesn’t have us on the brink of doom, at least that we’re aware of. However, some of the world’s leaders seem to be bent on getting us there. When Hard Sun ran recently in the United Kingdom, reviewers and audiences alike noted how timely the sci-fi/police procedural/ thriller felt.

“It metaphorically puts that out there, that the

world is a very precious thing and we need to look after it,” Sturgess said. “I think a lot of people are feeling a bit vulnerable at this point in time, with the madness that’s going on. So it seems to have tapped into a general nervousness about the state of the world and tapped into something quite real.” Cross hopes to tell more of the Hard Sun story, in terms of both the characters and the impending catastrophe. Sturgess wouldn’t mind a chance to return as Hicks. “It’s only just begun,” he said, “and the possibilities of what Neil could do with it are very exciting.” In the meantime Sturgess has been indulging his inner musician by recording some music in his home studio. He’s also got two films completed and awaiting release, namely JT LeRoy and Berlin, I Love You. JT LeRoy is based on the novel Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT Leroy ( 2008), and stars Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern, while Berlin, I Love You is an anthology film in the vein of Paris, Je T’aime ( 2006), with Sturgess featured in a segment directed by Peter Chelsom. Sturgess’s career could have taken a distinctly divergent turn a few years back. He went a fair ways down the road with Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), meeting with director James Gunn and auditioning on tape. He “got closer than I even expected, to be honest, down within the last two or three, I think,” but lost out to Chris Pratt for the breakthrough role of Peter Quill in the international blockbuster.

Any regrets? “It was a ver y big decision (to pursue Guardians of the Galaxy),” Sturgess said.

“These big movies can throw you in a very particular direction, and I really wasn’t sure how I felt about that. There are pluses and minuses to being involved in those things, but I just put myself into fate’s hands to see if that was going to be a path that my life would take me on or not.” It wasn’t, as it turned out, and Sturgess hesitated when asked if he’d take another shot if a similar blockbuster- franchise opportunity came his way. “It would depend on where I was at,” Sturgess said. “And a lot of it also depends on whether you like the creative people around the project, whether the script’s good, if you feel like it’ll be fun or that you can do something with the character. There’s a lot of factors that are going to go into it.” One more question, then: If, as is the case in Hard Sun, he found out that the world was to end in five years, how would he spend that time?

“I would probably break into really amazing buildings and places and do crazy stuff,” Sturgess said, laughing. “I’d maybe kick a football around the Emirates Stadium or play some tennis at Wimbledon, or something like that.”