Taron Egerton moved in with Elton John to prepare for ‘Rocketman’ role.

Taron Egerton has revealed he moved in with Elton John to get prepared for playing the iconic musician in upcoming biopic Rocketman.

The actor, aged 29, is set to play the Tiny Dancer singer and decided to best way to get to grips with his mannerisms was watching him in close quarters.

Egerton told Man About Town magazine: “I spent a fair bit of time with him before we started shooting.

“He didn’t come on set, thank God, I’d have found that really hard. But I went and stayed with him before we started shooting and he let me read his diaries and I hung out with him and got to ask him things….which certainly protects me a bit.

“He lends a bit of an air of authenticity and it gives this a bit of a seal of approval really, which is great. I still speak to him once or twice a week now. He’s very in my life. It’s nice… and a bit f**king surreal!”

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The actor also gave information about the difficulties of trying to get the vocal inflections to sound like the singer. Egerton said: “I have to say, I think when your primary objective is sounding like someone, then you slightly sacrifice a purity of expression and a real humanity. It can become a little bit sterile – I absolutely didn’t want to do that because this is about illuminating someone’s life and what’s really going on with them.

“So there’s inevitably a bit of Taron in there because we’re talking about the spirit of someone and about their inner life and their drug addiction, not about the way they move their mouth in an interview.”

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He added: “For me, it’s really fun telling this story in a slightly less conventional way because it means you can bend the character slightly. So me running around like a lunatic and dancing as if my life depended on it in this kind of wild, anarchic way, is not necessarily something we’ve seen Elton John do before. But that’s fun. We get that little more license.”