Las Vegas—When producer Kevin Spacey and director Robert Luketic went looking for the all-American boy for their film 21, they assumed they would find someone, well, American. But not surprisingly in a film industry that has so many Brits, Canadians, Irish, and Australians playing Yankee Doodle dandies, their best bet was an Englishman with what Luketic calls “a really bad audition tape”.

Across the Universe’s Jim Sturgess was working on The Other Boleyn Girl when his agent told him that Spacey and Luketic were auditioning actors to play an MIT math genius who joins up with a math professor and some other students to count cards and win millions in Las Vegas. The actor they were looking for had to be believable as a nerdy mathematician and, eventually, as an expert card player who loves the life of a successful gambler. (The movie opens in Vancouver on March 28.)

At a Las Vegas casino, Sturgess says that, based on his auditioning efforts, he didn’t think he would get the role. “I think my audition tape was one of the worst tapes in recent history. I was told that he [Luketic] wanted an audition tape, but I was stuck in rural England and I found someone with a camcorder. I auditioned by holding the camcorder and shooting myself with it. I thought, ‘Well, that is the end of that,’ but then Kevin phoned and said he would like to meet with me in London. We talked about it, and it went from there.”

Spacey says it wasn’t quite that simple. He says that Sony Pictures, the studio behind 21, had been impressed by Sturgess’s work in its film Across the Universe, and was ready to take a chance on him. “We wanted someone unknown, and a studio can take that risk. In an independent film, it’s harder to hire unknowns because you are concerned about getting someone who can help with the raising of the money. But if a studio believes in someone and says ‘This is the right guy,’ it helps a lot.”

Sony felt that although Sturgess was still relatively unknown, he would gain a following after the release of Across the Universe. Sturgess says that he was surprised when he heard that because until he came back to promote the movie in Las Vegas, he didn’t think anyone knew who he was. “When it [Across the Universe] came out, I was in Belfast,” he says. “It was not a hit there, so it passed me by. But now that I have been back here in America, I have noticed a few wandering eyes.”

Since no one knew him or most of 21’s young actors during filming, they were able to indulge in the Las Vegas lifestyle without scrutiny. “When we first got here we were excited, and we took things to their limit. We were here for about a month and a half, which is a long time to spend here, and the line for making the movie and what we did in our spare time was blurred. We gambled a lot.”