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As a devotee of the Manchester music scene, the prospect of auditioning for what looked like a cheesy Beatles musical hadn’t thrilled him. “My instant reaction was ‘an utter load of shit’.” Seduced, nevertheless, he found himself warbling through several Lennon/McCartney compositions as the lone Scouser on a magical mystery tour through 1960s American counterculture. Unfortunately mired in a studio dispute, Across the Universe sat around for a year, released in 2007 with nary a whimper. “It was marketed wrong,” he grumbles. The supposed big break had been denied.

Back home, on the set of The Other Boleyn Girl, where he had a small role as George Boleyn, Sturgess auditioned for the lead in 21, as the mild-mannered Bostonian medical student who gets sucked into the gambling machinations of Professor Kevin Spacey. “I just put myself on tape in my hotel room with a handheld camera, sent it off and thought nothing of it,” he shrugs. “Why they chose me to do it, I had no idea.”

Eyebrows were raised, but the film took $158m at the box office. It led Sturgess to the forthcoming Crossing Over, a sort of multistorey film, in the vein of Traffic, that highlights the plight of immigrants to America. “They said, ‘You’re gonna be in a film with Harrison Ford, Sean Penn, Ashley Judd and Ray Liotta’, and I didn’t work with any of them,” he laughs. A British film, Heartless, with Timothy Spall, about a young man’s deal with the devil, has also been completed. Meanwhile, Sturgess has travelled to Bulgaria for his “long beard” film — Peter Weir’s The Way Back, based on the memoir of Slawomir Rawicz, about fugitives from a Siberian gulag escaping overland all the way to India. “Me and Ed Harris are in it beginning to end, every scene, all the way through,” he assures.

Intriguingly, Sturgess has been in New York, workshopping Taymor’s stage version of Spider-Man (with music by Bono and the Edge), alongside his Across the Universe love interest, Evan Rachel Wood — the peaches-and-cream beauty who has since shocked a few people, including her parents, no doubt, by shacking up with Marilyn Manson. “I know he went round for Christmas dinner,” Sturgess smirks.

Such chat seems frivolous under the weight of responsibility bearing on a film like Fifty Dead Men Walking. McGartland himself tried to block its release, objecting to a portrayal that includes scenes of torture and execution not featured in his book. (His own attempted assassination has been transposed to maritime Canada, as a nod to the backers.) “A book and a movie are two very different audience experiences, and I had to take that into account as a storyteller,” explains Kari Skogland, the film’s writer/director. “It was never meant to be a documentary, and aspects have to be fictionalised. It was agreed by everyone, including Martin, to keep the book and the film title the same.” A reputed cash settlement and the rebilling of the movie as “inspired by true events” have seemingly failed to assuage him.

“The fact of the matter is that Jim and others have made a film based on lies,” McGartland told The Sunday Times recently. “It is one-sided and it was controlled, with an iron fist, by IRA terrorists who were all over the film set from day one, for creative input and also protection — that is the truth.”

Clearly, it is a wound that will likely never heal. The pain for McGartland, living incognito on the mainland to this day, has been his inability to return home, denied the chance of ever seeing his wife and children again. If the attitude of Sinn

Fein and the IRA has supposedly relaxed towards former informers, it does not preclude freelance reprisal. “I remember asking one of them (the ex-IRA advisers) what would happen if he came back,” Sturgess says with total earnestness. “He just gave me a look that said a thousand words.”

Fifty Dead Men Walking opens on April 10

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