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 stories 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, ‘OK, 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 US$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.”

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