Two of a Kind Adds Up to '21'

Just over a year ago, two men adjourned after dinner to the balcony of the Palms Casino in Vegas. There they would take in the glittering vista, light a couple of Cuban cigars and trade tales of the good life.

Big shots, the both of them.

An on-the-rise actor and the high-rolling professional gambler he was about to portray in a major motion picture, "21."

Too bad neither of them could get the blasted stogies to light.

"And we were just reduced to the clowns that we are," recalls Jim Sturgess, the actor. "It broke down all the boundaries very quickly. And then we just went, 'Okay, I'm not that cool.' 'I'm not that cool, either -- let's just talk about what really happened.' "

So they're clowns, not big shots, but what really happened to each of them is extraordinary enough.

Jeff Ma, the gambler, was a studious mechanical engineering major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he was invited to join the school's underground but notorious card-counting team. On the secretive squad of math whiz kids, he learned how to win at blackjack, found out he was astonishingly good at it and spent crazy weekends taking casinos all across the country for tens of thousands of dollars in a run. Ultimately, the smart kid from Worcester, Mass., cashed in chips that totaled nearly $1 million.

It wasn't something his parents wanted to hear a lot about. But when he handed them a book about himself and his team's exploits, they began to understand. "Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions," by Ben Mezrich, became a bestseller about five years ago. Ma, now 35, became a hero to math nerds and would-be card counters everywhere.

His life, he says, was "indelibly changed -- period." Ma is banned from playing blackjack in most major Vegas casinos, but is something of a legend in the gambling world, a sought-after speaker who says he's in a position to never take a job "that I didn't love doing every day."

Meanwhile, in a small town outside London, Sturgess was working as "a pot-wash boy" and sulking that his buddies had all gone off to college, thus breaking up their sure-to-be-famous rock band.

Partly to please his parents (and mostly as a ruse to find a new band) he enrolled in a two-year film and theater program in Manchester. But something about this new world of art felt natural, and Sturgess began writing and acting, eventually landing an agent who persuaded him to try his luck in London.

He did, and luck led him, via another band and another band breakup, to a crack at a role in a Beatles musical movie. (Which he thought, by the way, "was a really [expletive] idea.") But when he was cast and learned that the film, "Across the Universe," was being directed by Julie Taymor and had Evan Rachel Wood as a costar, the whole thing "spun my life completely out of control."

Meaning, he was given a part in "The Other Boleyn Girl" and asked to audition for the role of the Jeff Ma character, whose name was changed to Ben Campbell, in "21." Sturgess, 26, had never stepped inside a casino, much less played blackjack or known how to count cards.

But he got the gig as the movie's lead, and over the course of those unlit stogies and an awful lot of goofing-around time, came to know Ma and comprehend the events he'd assumed were all fiction while reading the book.

"I just couldn't believe that he'd done all these things," Sturgess says.

The two are buddies now, partying together during the press tour and kidding around between interviews. And the thing is -- for this moment, anyway-- they're once again dipping into the role of big shots. Handlers, red carpets, suites at the Four Seasons even when they're zipping through town so quickly it doesn't require an overnight stay.

Around each other, though, they're still clowns. But if nothing else, this adventure will at least give their parents a little boost of assurance.

"They're so excited," Sturgess says, smiling. "And, I think, shocked and relieved that I've managed to pull something off."