He may look it, but for some reason Jude Law doesn’t act like God’s gift to
the female film-goer. Take All the King’s Men, which opened here a week ago.
It looks as if Law and Kate Winslet will finally get to play out the romance
that has seemed preordained since they began their simultaneous rises in the
1990s. Our leading man and our leading lady, hooking up on screen at last.
It makes such sense.
Winslet’s character even undresses and clambers into bed. But Law has to go
and complicate things. Something doesn’t feel right, and he keeps his
clothes on. He is in the grip of a pathology that could be called Law’s law.
“I never talked about it with anyone,” he says, “but looking back over the
past 10 years, I realise I used to set myself these little laws I had to
live by. I used to have this problem with playing the dashing romantic lead.
I thought, I’m not going to do that. I refused, because I wanted to prove
myself as an actor; I wanted to show, as quickly as I could, that I could do
different characters, so I’d send out the right signals to people I wanted
to work with that I was the real deal.” They got the message. Law has worked
with Spielberg, Scorsese and Cronenberg, with Mike Nichols and Clint
Eastwood and Sam Mendes. That eye-catching, buttock-pumping early
performance as Lord Alfred Douglas in Wilde can now be read as a mission
statement. As Oscar’s preening, peevish, beautiful brat, Law was the
embodiment of amatory dysfunction. It was but a shortish step to playing
Dickie Greenleaf, the gilded cock of the walk in The Talented Mr Ripley,
whose beauty disqualifies him from censure (that is, until he’s beaten to
death).
After that performance, which earned Law his first Oscar nomination, the world
was his oyster. So what did he do? He decided to specialise in allowing
leading ladies to slip through his fingers. In Closer, his character screws
up relationships with Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts. In Cold Mountain,
he is separated from Nicole Kidman for most of the film, then pegs it.
Alfie? Loveless shagathon with various up-for-it society girls, including
Sienna Miller and Jane Krakowski. In Enemy at the Gates, his affair with
Rachel Weisz is thwarted by the siege of Stalingrad. And now there’s not
only Winslet; there’s also Juliette Binoche, with whom his character has an
ultimately doomed affair in the upcoming Breaking and Entering.
This morning, Law is wearing a gumshoe coat over a grungy T-shirt, and a
baseball cap, which he keeps in place for the duration of our encounter. And
still he is the very model of a modern matinée idol. Just what is his reason
for not playing ball? “They’re the juicy parts, aren’t they? The ones that
are challenging and unusual and hard work and stretching and, I hope — I
think — always different.”
Outside, it’s chucking it down. Law has brought a coffee and a muffin. A
couple of times, a publicist sticks her head through the door to terminate
the meeting, but, leaning forward in his armchair, Law talks on. There must
be more to his counterintuitive choices than a thirst for juicy parts. It
would be trite to put it all down to the idea that he is a character actor
trapped in the body of a leading man. Clearly, he knows he looks like a
matinée idol, because he played Errol Flynn in The Aviator. How about this
theory? He felt guilty and even ashamed about enjoying the fruits of his
looks as much as he clearly did as the gorgeous Dickie. Which is why he
never lets himself get the girl.
“I think it was much more straightforward,” he says. “It was the case of a
21-year-old kid being early on referred to constantly as the pretty guy, and
wanting to be taken seriously as an actor, because that’s how I saw myself.
I saw a problem up ahead — I’m going to be cast as the boyfriend. I wanted
to have some shelf life.”
Law has made a lot of films in the past four years, and was all for having a
rest after All the King’s Men. “We know, I hope, if we’re all adults, that
divorce is very expensive. And I also have three kids. The past few years
have been somewhat unsettling for me, and therefore I’ve had to look to try
to make cash. That’s all far too revealing. But true.” However, the script
Anthony Minghella sent him was, for personal reasons, too good to turn down.
Breaking and Entering is their third collaboration, after Ripley and Cold
Mountain. For this outing, in an original script by Minghella, they are back
in the present day and back on home turf. Law, 33, grew up in south London
but, like Minghella, lives in north London, where the film is set. He plays
Will, an architect whose company is regenerating King’s Cross. Given the
number of break-ins his warehouse office is suffering, it can’t be
regenerated soon enough. The same goes for his home life, in which his
austere Swedish girlfriend (played by Robin Wright Penn) and her autistic
daughter have an all-consuming relationship, leaving little space for Will.
When he tracks down the Bosnian teenager who burgled his office, he soon
falls for his ravishing mother, only to discover that she, too, puts
motherly love before any other kind.
Playing Will is the closest Law has ever come to portraying, if not himself,
then someone like him. “I was interested in playing someone in a slightly
more mature relationship, at a more mature stage in their life. It felt more
familiar to me to play someone who was established in their work and a
parent at home — all this stuff I know I am that I’ve never put into a
role.” During filming, in the summer of 2005, life imitated art a bit too
faithfully for comfort. Law was portraying a man who was playing away from
home just as similar goings-on were being widely reported about his own
private life.
“I’ve only just realised that the parallels are somewhat obvious,” he says.
“To be honest, I was so unbelievably raw and racked with pain, because of
the part and also because of what was going on — I fought my way to work
through a sea of hyenas — that I don’t really remember the experience of
making this film or that entire period of my life. I really don’t. I was
surviving it and trying to commit to a day’s work. They say hell is
repeating your deadly sin over and over and over. It was a bit of a case of
that — ‘Oh, hang on, now I’ve got to demonstrate this in performance.’”
On the plus side, it made his edges look rougher. How Law is presented in our
less lovable tabloids is relevant to his work only insofar as he believes
passionately that acting should “not always involve playing the bad guy or
the good guy, but trying to find that route in to play a real person, a
whole person”. He learnt that when searching for redeeming features in Lord
Alfred Douglas. “The exciting thing about good writing,” he adds, “is when
you have the opportunity to play someone who has messed up.”
