Stepping Up To Broadway: Nine Fresh Faces Hit the Great White Way
June 4, 1995
By Patrick Pacheco, FanFare Sunday supplement

Jude Law
Indiscretions

Jude Law received a lot of advice when he arrived in New York from London to re-create his role in the Royal National Theater Production of Indiscretions. “Numerous people told me to watch my back,” says the 22-year-old newcomer, who won a Tony nomination for playing the young innocent in Jean Cocteau’s Freudian sex farce at the Barrymore Theater. While Law may have been watching his back, audiences were watching his raw and high-octane performance, featuring one of the more talked about nude scenes of the season. Law says he welcomed the chance not only to take another stab at his character with a totally new cast, but also to bask in the “glow” that surrounds Broadway. “In my heart of hearts, I knew I wanted to come to New York.”

The London-born actor toured Italy with his parents’ theater troupe, playing such roles as Freddie in Pygmalion. Following “a raw impulse to act,” Law left school to do a British television series (“A lot of money, but I felt like a whore”) and eventually took refuge in the National Youth Music Theater and the RSC. Like Michael in Indiscretions, his role in Euripides’ first comedy-tragedy, Ions charted the journey of a young man from ignorance to wisdom, from innocence to insight- something Law himself can relate to.

“I’ve learned vast amounts in the last year about success and failure, about the need to know your worth. Or you’ll be a sucker when everybody else is reaping corn,” says the actor, who will soon be seen as a car thief in the film Shopping and who is shooting a film in New York while appearing on Broadway. “I hope I’m more realistic than cynical. For all the insults that have been hurled on Generation X, we have a huge capacity to keep going, even though our heroes kill themselves, lovemaking is dangerous and famine and war are everywhere. But I think there are reasons to be optimistic. Hope is nothing if it’s not tested.”