Dark, dashing, almost flawless
February 24, 2000
By Anna Murphy

With an Oscar nomination for his role in The Talented Mr Ripley, Jude Law has the world at his feet – just as his director predicted. What next? Anna Murphy asks him.

PICTURE this. You are sitting in an anonymous hotel room. There is a knock at the door. You hesitate, then decide to answer it. And there, on the other side of the door, is Jude Law, arguably the most dashing British actor of the moment, unarguably the most feted. He is wearing black tie. The night is young . . .

But Law swoops into the room like a man with a train to catch, or rather a premiere to attend. I have 35 minutes of his time and it is most definitely business, not pleasure. It is the night of the London premiere of The Talented Mr Ripley, Anthony Minghella’s luxuriously dark adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel. It is also the night before the morning after, when Law will receive a supporting actor Oscar nomination for his role in the film as the spoilt but irresistible Ivy Leaguer Dickie Greenleaf, frittering away his father’s fortune on the Italian Riviera.

Law asks for coffee, matches for his Marlboro Lights and for Sadie, his wife. Where is she? Is she on her way? Ten minutes or 15? It is because of Sadie Frost, an actress-cum-underwear designer (yes, really), that Law has most recently been in the news. A couple of weeks ago there was that unfortunate incident when she got stuck in a lift in Berlin and ended up in police custody (“it was a farcical situation . . . I don’t want to talk about it”). She obviously needs keeping an eye on.

Law is looking tired – he is currently working six days a week on Enemy at the Gate, a film based on Antony Beevor’s book Stalingrad – but he is also looking good. Even the bags under his storm-dark eyes are something special – neat double semicircles, exactly symmetrical. His hair is fastidiously unbrushed, his skin the colour of butter toffee (as sun-loving Dickie in Ripley he looked like he had been dipped head-first in a tub of molasses, good enough to eat). In fact, scouting desperately for flaws, all I can stretch to is that his fingers are a little too short, and his feet a little too long. “Only size 10,” he exclaims in mock horror.

The 27-year-old Law grew up in Lewisham, the son of two teachers (who named him after Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure). He learnt his craft at the National Youth Music Theatre and in a dodgy Manchester-based TV soap called Families, but first won acclaim in Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles at the National in 1994, when he spent much of his time on stage naked.

Since then we have seen both more and – with the exception of a couple of memorable moments in the buff – less of him, in several well-regarded but not particularly successful films. He has been “up-and-coming” for years, but now, with this latest role, he may finally have up-and-come-of-age. Minghella has predicted that “the world is going to be at Jude’s feet after this film”, and the Oscar nomination seems to confirm this.

It would have been easy for Law to make a career out of his matinée-idol appearance. And in a way he has. The one constant in his work is that looks – his – can be deceptive. His two most notable roles prior to Dickie were essentially armcandy – he played Bosie to Stephen Fry’s Oscar in Wilde, a hustler to Kevin Spacey’s wealthy connoisseur in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil – but his was the kind of candy to stick in the teeth and make them rot. These characters caused despair, destruction, even death.

Doesn’t he like playing “nice” roles? “I just like characters that have fullness,” he says, in a kind of soft growl, very RADA, with just a hint of south London for credibility. “Like with Bosie, here was someone who everybody said was a complete shit. But I thought, He was the apple of Oscar’s eye, there must have been something about him. I think sometimes you have to work hard to find the nice things in people . . . sometimes you have to work hard to find the darker things. It’s the same in life. Often that is the process of a relationship with someone.”

Initially the character of Dickie Greenleaf in Ripley seemed just too sugar-sweet for Law, and he was on the point of turning it down. “I couldn’t see beyond this rich, charismatic dude,” he explains, leaning forward in his chair, waving his arms around like one of the Italian extras. “I didn’t want to shortshrift myself with a role that didn’t leave me anywhere to go. Then I met Anthony [Minghella] and he said I hadn’t seen all the colours, that Dickie had to resonate through the film, that I had to make people like him. That was the real challenge, because if you show a British audience a person who has everything, they are immediately going to dislike him.”

So successful was Law’s “resonating” as Dickie Greenleaf that some critics have felt that he, rather than Matt Damon, should have been given the lead role of Tom Ripley. In fact, there is a pleasing kind of logic to the critical carping. The film is about the blurring identities of the two characters, about Ripley becoming Greenleaf. How apt, then, if people feel “Greenleaf” (Law) should have been “Ripley” (Damon) all along.

Law won’t be drawn on the debate. “I was never offered Dickie so I never really thought about it,” he says. What was it like acting alongside his American contemporaries, superstars such as Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow? “Working with them made me realise how much easier it is just to stick to acting when you are British. They both had to deal with so much fluff because they were American actors and therefore American movie stars.”

But surely Law’s life can’t be “fluff”-free? He is a celebrity. So too, to a lesser degree, is his wife (whom he met on the execrable 1993 film Shopping). So are his friends (the actors Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller and Sean Pertwee, with whom he has set up the film production company Natural Nylon).

“The attention you get all depends on how much money a film makes and how many people go to see it. So far, although I am proud of the films I have made, none of them has made much money. That could change. But I have a family, and I rarely go to any celebrity functions or opening nights because I don’t enjoy them. People have started to create a fanfare around me and Sadie but it is not like we are going out wearing backless dresses every night. It seems we have been given that role but we know the truth.”

The truth, says Law, is that he stays in six nights a week looking after his three-year-old son Rafferty. Does he ever worry about what his growing fame will mean for his son? “No. He has a great time. His Dad’s a soldier at the moment, that is all he cares about. And when we were in Italy he was just obsessed that I had a boat and every boat in the harbour was Dad’s boat.”

And has Law’s growing reputation as an actor caused tension with his wife, whose own career has been lacklustre in comparison? “No. Sadie has made a choice that she doesn’t want to do studio pictures because it will take her away from her older son Finn [by her first husband, Spandau Ballet man Gary Kemp]. I am in a different situation.

“With her at home it is easier for me to go away and her to come and visit with the children. Besides, you really can’t take seriously what people say about each of you. It affects you but you can’t let it affect you. What are you going to do? Get a divorce because of what someone has written about you in a paper? We are both very supportive of each other.”

Just how supportive Law has had to be was evident recently when money to back a Natural Nylon project – a film about Christopher Marlowe, starring husband and wife – was to be withdrawn if Sadie Frost wasn’t replaced by a more bankable name (rumour had it, a certain Ms Paltrow). Law has since pulled out, and he claims that thanks to films such as Ripley the “powerchips are starting to come back in to Natural Nylon”.

Although this is a boast that doesn’t quite ring true – their pet project is still going ahead without either of them – Law is certainly now what might be called a player. Indeed, Jude the Obscure is fast becoming Jude the Really-Rather-Famous. And next month he may well become Jude the Oscarwinner, too.