Hollywood saw that possibility in Sturgess, and in 2008 he was offered leading roles in big studio movies—everything from the romantic leads Hugh Grant was getting too old to play convincingly to superheroes. He turned them all down. “I wasn’t all that tempted,” he told me in July on the phone from his home in London. “Although it’s hard to say no when it’s more money than you’ve ever seen in your life.” Instead, Sturgess, who is now 30, chose to act in an independent film called Fifty Dead Men Walking, playing an Irish informant. He forsook a very commercial American accent for an Irish accent so thick his mother found it disturbing to speak to him. “She’d say, ‘Speak properly,’” he said, rather proudly. “‘I can’t understand a word you’re saying.’”

This delight in the difficult, the challenging, and the obscure has kept Sturgess busy in movies that no one has seen. In 2010 he was touching and unrecognizable as a man with a disfiguring port-wine birthmark covering his face in Heartless, and he was compelling in ­Peter Weir’s The Way Back as a Polish prisoner (yet another accent) who escaped from a Siberian deten­tion camp during World War II.

In truth, I was simultaneously impressed and a little disappointed by Sturgess’s choices. I wanted him to be a star rather than a great-looking character actor. And yet I wasn’t surprised: When I first met him in 2008 at the lobby lounge in the Mercer hotel in New York, he was about to play Peter Parker in a workshop for Taymor’s musical version of Spider-Man. Although the project looked promising then, Sturgess knew he didn’t want to be on Broadway, but he loved Taymor and was still in an Across the Universe afterglow. “We lived that movie,” he told me. “I was working on it for nine months.” He looked over at our waiter. “I was so in the movie that I still find it strange that everyone doesn’t break into Beatles songs all the time. I half expect that waiter to sing.”

Then (and now), Sturgess seemed much more interested in the moviemaking-as-experience idea rather than career (or star) building. As an actor and a person, he wanted to live another life—to soak up and become one with the atmosphere of Vegas, Eastern Europe, Belfast, or wherever the film world took place. “Some people have snapshots,” he told me. “My postcards—my gifts—at the end of these trips are the films.”

Which is why I was secretly thrilled to see Sturgess in One Day as the romantic lead opposite Anne Hathaway. Although the film has a melancholic undertow, it re-establishes Sturgess as a potential movie star. Based on the best-selling novel, One Day follows a couple that meets on the same day for 20 years. Sturgess plays Dexter Mayhew, who starts out callow and effortlessly charming and, as he ages, becomes lonely and adrift. It’s a subtle performance—complex and haunting. “I thought Dexter would be a ­really fun character to play,” he said. “He’s vulgar and obnoxious, and that’s fun. But he was a lot more tragic and desperate than I thought. Truthfully, I spent a lot of my time being miserable.”

Due to his distance from commercial films, Sturgess was required to audition for director Lone Scherfig to get the part in One Day. “I had to do a screen test,” he said matter-of-factly. “They also wanted me to read with Anne to see if we had ‘chemistry.’ There was all this awful pressure—it was very nerve-wracking—but Anne was great. In the end I didn’t mind auditioning or the screen test. I feel like you know it’s a great project if they ask you to audition.”

In all likelihood, in the eyes of Hollywood, One Day will relaunch Sturgess, but he is still not interested in becoming a classic leading man. “As corny as it may sound,” he said to me, “I have a love of cinema. I don’t want to be a ‘celebrity’ or a ‘movie star.’ That was never my goal.”

While I may long for these new leading men to be movie stars and replenish the ranks of Hollywood, I probably shouldn’t. Their goal—to create original characters in intriguing circumstances—is more interesting. “I can’t imagine that it’s any fun to be typecast,” Sturgess told me. “I’d rather risk failing than repeat myself. And if that means that I never become famous, that’s okay.”

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One Day is also out across the UK, and I saw it myself tonight. I thought Jim was exceptional as Dexter, and that the film itself was really enjoyable. Make sure you check it out!