IF YOU REALLY CARE, THEN EVERYTHING ELSE LOOKS AFTER ITSELF: TARON EGERTON

Since becoming a star overnight with Kingsman, Taron Egerton has proved his range as a song-and-dance man, and showcased serious dramatic chops as well as a crowd-pleasing lightness of touch. With the release of a surprising new Tetris movie, is everything falling into place for the next phase of his career?

- MATT MAYTUM

When Taron Egerton hops on a Zoom call with Total Film in early February 2023, he’s not in the usual chic hotel room or video-studio setting. In fact, he’s sitting in an unassuming kitchen, having returned home to Wales. After a busy run of work, he’s back to spend time with his family. ‘It’s nice, man,’ he smiles, dressed casually in a plain black T-shirt. ‘And also, I was in America for quite a while with [2022 Apple TV+ series] Black Bird being released. I came home for about a week, and then went and did a Netflix movie in New Orleans. So it sort of felt like I’ve not been home in ages.’

The jumping-off point for our chat today is Tetris, the latest film that Egerton stars in from Matthew Vaughn’s British-American production company Marv Studios. Directed by Jon S. Baird (Filth, Stan & Ollie), Tetris is not a video-game movie in the traditional sense. After all, that addictive, thumb-twiddling blockbuster is hardly blockbuster material. Instead, Tetris tells the story of the development of the insanely popular puzzler that would go on to sell hundreds of millions of copies, and the battle to secure the rights. If that sounds dry on the page, it involves globe-trotting, double-crossing, the Soviet Union, a race against time and pension-snaffling media baron Robert Maxwell.

Set in the late 80s, Tetris stars Egerton as Henk Rogers, a Dutch-born, US-raised entrepreneur living in Japan with his family. When he claps eyes on an early version of the game Tetris, he’s bowled over by its potential and sets out to secure distribution rights, which is anything but simple, and will see him heading to Moscow and putting his family’s livelihood on the line.