Kate Bosworth and Jim Sturgess aren’t exactly what you’d call experts when it comes to playing card games. Poker? Nope. Blackjack? Sorry.
And they’re both bad at math.
So it makes perfect sense, then, that they’d play a pair of card-counting blackjack aces in the get-rich-quick caper “21,” opening this weekend.
Loosely based on the real story of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who card-counted their way to a fortune in Vegas, “21” stars Sturgess and Bosworth as math whizzes recruited by a professor (Kevin Spacey, who’s also a producer) to join his team of blackjack weekend warriors. Bosworth plays Jill, who helps lure Ben (Sturgess) into the scheme. Ben then becomes the team’s No. 1 player.
“Playing a mathematical genius was pretty fun considering that math was my worst subject [in school],” Bosworth said.
Sturgess says he thought the script, adapted from Ben Mezrich’s best-selling nonfiction book “Bringing Down the House,” was pure fiction when he first read it.
“And I liked it even then,” he said. “But then I was told that it was fact, and these students just went back and forth to Vegas and rinsed the place clean. That was amazing to me.”
Counting cards — remembering which cards have been played so you have a good idea what’s left to be played — is legal, though it’s strongly discouraged by casinos. It’s still a touchy subject in Las Vegas, as producers learned when they began scouting locations for the film; many big casinos refused to allow their properties to be used for filming.
“We had a lot of lessons and I got to understand it in theory,” said Sturgess, best known for his role in the Beatles-influenced “Across the Universe.” “But putting it into practice is just a whole other thing.
“I’d never played 21 in my life,” he said. “I was in over my head, definitely.”
Shooting the film in Vegas also was an eye-opener for Sturgess, who grew up in England and had never been to Sin City.
“I’d never experienced anything like it. We don’t have things like that in England,” he said. “I found it to be both a very exciting, fun place and very depressing.”
For Bosworth, one of the most enjoyable aspects of playing Jill was playing a character within a character when the students hit the casinos in a variety of costumes.
“I went to town with that one,” she said. “That was one of my favorite things. When I did a little bit of research into what these kids went through and started learning that they were beginning to be recognized by the eyes in the sky and then having to put on disguises, I thought that was a great element. So I just sort of made that my character’s thing more than anyone else.”
Bosworth’s Jill is loosely based on a real person for whom gambling was an inherited addiction from her father.
“I got to meet her in Boston actually, which was exciting for me,” Bosworth said. “She’s a lawyer now in Boston. I found it quite funny that they’re all pretty casual about the situation. I … wanted to hear the details and she was blase about it.”
Jill and Ben may be based on real people, but the love affair between the two characters was purely the stuff of Hollywood.
“This was all for the excitement of the audience,” Bosworth said. “I think she married someone from the team but they’re not together any more.”
And although Bosworth can understand how the real woman she portrayed got caught up in such a calculated high-stakes scam, the actress says she never really came down with a bad case of the fever during the weeks she spent in Vegas shooting the film. In fact, the self-avowed “safe gambler” got a little burned out on 21.
“You do kind of get sick of it after a while,” she said.
Sturgess concurred.
“Vegas is 100 percent calculated and designed. It knows exactly what it’s doing to you, and it knows you can lose your way,” he said. “There are no windows in those places, there are no clocks. … By the end of it, we were all slowly going insane.”
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Jim Sturgess
Age: 26
Where you’ve seen him: “Across the Universe,” “The Other Boleyn Girl”
Next up: “Crossing Over” with Harrison Ford and Sean Penn, and “Fifty Dead Men Walking” with Rose McGowan
Kate Bosworth
Age: 25
Where you’ve seen her: “Blue Crush,” “Beyond the Sea,” “Superman Returns”
Next up: “The Laundry Warrior,” a fantasy action film with Geoffrey Rush
QUICK PICK
21 (PG-13)
3 stars
Who’s in it: Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey, Laurence Fishburne, Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts
What it’s about: A group of brainiacs from MIT make millions in Vegas by counting cards.
Worth watching? “It isn’t as gritty as ‘Rounders’ or as glamorous as Danny Ocean’s scams, but anyone stepping to the box office window is making a safe bet.”
– Steve Persall, St. Petersburg Times
