In 2008 Jim Sturgess was about to become a movie star, the kind of actor who combines good looks, talent, and the sort of cinema charisma that attracts audiences. The Englishman had starred in 21 as an American M.I.T. math whiz who wins a fortune counting cards and beating the system at blackjack in Las Vegas, as well as in Across the Universe, a brilliant ode to the Beatles, directed by Julie Taymor, in which he sang and played a cross between Lennon and McCartney. Quite a year. Loosely based on a true story, 21 made $160 million worldwide, and Sturgess, who is tall and handsome and makes smart look sexy, was poised to be, perhaps, the next great leading man. Movie stars—even potential movie stars—are rare; they can be great actors (think of Paul Newman or George Clooney or, more recently, Robert Downey Jr.), but, more elusively, they must be alluring to the paying public. Magically, a star is able to combine his own personality with the character’s, resulting in a melding of the familiar and the new.

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One Day is a book that makes people ruminate over lost loves, grow hopelessly nostalgic for the boundless opportunities of youth, and weep softly around the pool when they finish reading it on holiday. In fact, it’s such a phenomenon that we’ve seen as many burly men avidly reading its pages on the Tube as we have women.

By all accounts, it is not something you want to mess with — so it’s a brave man who attempts to turn such a national treasure into a film. Thankfully, that man is also the book’s author, David Nicholls. And, doubly thankfully, the man who’s cast to play Dexter, the Nineties’ lad-culture TV presenter who descends into ruination, is 33-year-old Jim Sturgess, one of the big hopes of the British acting firmament.

Not only does he possess the indie looks that could easily have seen him on the cover of The Face in 1994 (had he not been studying for his GCSEs), but he also has the acting prowess to deliver. This is the man who broke out with 2007’s Across The Universe, who headed up cult British horror Heartless in 2009, who starred with Colin Farrell in 2010’s The Way Back. He can handle the pressure. Just you watch.

People are passionate about this book. Have you Googled yourself to check the ever-fickle public are convinced you’re the man for the job?

[Laughs] I haven’t specifically looked but I have seen some comments. One of them said, “Why do they always cast American actors in these British films? Jim Sturgess’s British accent is terrible.” That was my favourite.

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Playing the role of Dexter in “One Day,” a film directed by Lone Scherfig, Jim Sturgess shared the screen with Anne Hathaway who played Emma, his best friend of two decades. Based on the book by David Nicholls, who also wrote the screenplay, the film revisits the friends on every July 15, starting on their graduation day from college.

As the rain came down in sheets outside the Waldorf Astoria Towers, Sturgess sunk into a flowery couch in his suite. Two carts of room service food had been left by the door, carefully monitored by his host of agents. Speakeasy talked with a surprisingly antsy Sturgess as he adjusted and readjusted his skinny tie.

David Nicholls book is beloved by American and British audiences. Were you nervous about being the living, breathing Dexter?

I wasn’t at the beginning at all because I hadn’t heard of the book. I read the screenplay first and met with Lone [Scherfig]. I responded to it; it was a good script. That alone, I was interested. Then I was away, I was filming somewhere else and that’s when I read the book. So I wasn’t around the madness behind the book in England. Then we made the film and since making the film my radar is much more open. I just see it everywhere now. Every time I sit on a train five people are reading it. And in England the book is bright orange and at night it almost illuminates the streets of London. It’s everywhere. So now I’m starting to think “oh my god, what have I done.”

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Jim’s had a busy few weeks with the promotional tour for One Day, and the reviews of the film and flying in! I’ve started to round up the videos from his various TV appearances and magazine interviews, check the first few out here and the rest beneath the cut: