There have been a number of interviews and reviews in today’s news from major New York, Boston, and Chicago outlets giving Jim’s performance as Martin McGartland in Fifty Dead Men Walking raves.  Here’s a sampling below:

Woman’s Wear Daily spoke with Jim about his ’double life’ in the film. “I was constantly swinging from feeling like a hero to feeling like a rat,” says Sturgess of the experience (the real life McGartland’s cover was compromised and he remains in hiding).  “It was to put a face and personality to these terrorists, to actually spend time with them. It just upset and confused me more than anything,” says Sturgess, who saw an interrogation room and how bombs were made. “It’s easy to have the image of balaclava and the gunmen and not go further than that. That was certainly my interpretation of the IRA as a young kid growing up in the Eighties.”

The Wall Street Journal asked Jim about preparing for the violent scenes in the film.  “Throughout the shoot, I was constantly in pain from being beaten up. Ironically, [co-star Kevin Zegers and I] joined a boxing gym when we first got to Ireland and I dislocated my shoulder before we even started shooting, which was also painful.  For the torture scene, I really didn’t have to do that much acting because it was freezing and miserable the day we actually shot. For me, it was emotionally hard because during the course of my research and the production, I’d met a lot of nice people who were formerly in the IRA, and to suddenly see and re-enact a scene like Martin’s torture was mind-blowing. To think that these people that we had met had engaged in such terrible acts? It was hard to believe.”

The Examiner published a lengthly interview with Jim Sturgess and BenKingsley at the NYC Press Junket: 

What was it like playing characters that had to act and pretend to be someone they’re not?
Kingsley: It was good for me, because I try to tread that fine line between minimalism and acting, because Fergus is not allowed to give anything away. So again, I couldn’t judge, sentimentalize, I couldn’t hardly even act.

Sturgess: That was another thing about doing the accent, going into some of these areas and some of these pubs where I’d never be allowed to tread as myself. So there was that fear and that tension when I would go to these bars and chat with these people and just hang out with these people, putting on as though I was a local kid from the area. You really got a sense of “Sh*t are they going to find out?” 

Chicago’s Daily Herald says about Jim, “Appealing English actor Jim Sturgess plays Martin as a conflicted soul constantly drawn into suspenseful circumstances. Sturgess’ transparent portrait of Martin dominates this drama with such immediate, egoless power that it easily compensates for the times that the story falls into confusing alliances among a kajillion factions scrambling for political traction in Belfast.”

Boston Herald.com says, “Sturgess brings a lean and hungry look to Martin, a mix of outrage and fear. His work recalls Victor McLaglen’s Academy Award-winning turn as Gypo Nolan in John Ford’s 1935 classic “The Informer.”

The New York Times says, “Mr. Sturgess’s Martin is almost unrecognizable from the Paul-McCartney-John Lennon-like hybrid he embodied so appealingly in Across the Universe.  Here he is a scruffy, mustached petty crook whose anarchic impulses and daredevil nature are channeled into espionage. After the opening scene, set in Canada in 1999, in which Martin is shot several times, the story flashes back to 1988, to find him eking out a living as a door-to-door salesman of stolen shoes and clothing in Belfast.”

Chicago Tribune gives the film 3 stars and says about Jim’s acting, “Jim Sturgess is excellent as McGartland, a hustler (we first meet him when he’s selling stolen undergarments door to door) whose double life threatens to split him in two. This young actor, who starred in the card-sharp schlocker “21” and “Across the Universe,” is the Meryl Streep of England—in terms of his skill with dialects, that is. The performance doesn’t settle for showboating, though: In his interactions with his British security op (Ben Kingsley), or with his lover (Natalie Press, eloquent in her depiction of a woman living with a shadow of a man), Sturgess lets us see the thrill of deceit as well as the panic induced by all the bloodletting in the ongoing Irish war.”