‘I don’t enjoy the film-star bit’
February 17, 2001
By John Hiscock

Jude Law is in the next Sam Mendes film and Spielberg’s A.I., so why doesn’t he see himself as a screen idol?

JUDE LAW rubs the two-day stubble on his chin. Having just finished filming Steven Spielberg’s science-fiction project A.I., he is enjoying the luxury of being able to abstain from shaving in the mornings. “I really hate shaving and in A.I. I had to be totally clean-shaven every day – it drove me mad,” he says. “I’m just lazy.”

Considering his recent workload, that’s difficult to believe. Just before A.I. he spent four months in the bitterly cold east-German winter, most of the time up to his ankles in snow, mud and slush, playing the Russian sniper Vasily Zaitsev in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Second World War epic Enemy at the Gates. As soon as that film opens in the UK next month, he will be off to brave the bone-chilling winds of Chicago for his next role, in Sam Mendes’s The Road to Perdition with Tom Hanks and Paul Newman.

After almost 15 years of playing mainly flawed characters on television, stage and cinema, Law is poised to join the ranks of the world’s leading male actors. Uma Thurman, his co-star in the underrated Gattaca, had noted the glamour that he can bring to a part when she dubbed him “The Actor-Slash-Rock-Star”, and his Oscar-nominated performance as the beautiful, self-absorbed Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley validated her admiring assessment. With Enemy at the Gates, Jude Law will almost certainly fulfill the predictions of those who have picked him as the Next Big Star.

All of which is very gratifying to the 29-year-old Londoner, though he says, “To me, acting isn’t about fame. People often assume that you are the role you play, but the real me is the person at home eating toast. My children don’t care whether I’m famous or not. They don’t see me as anything other than dad, and I will still be just their dad in 16 years time – when they’ll probably despair of me.”

Rachel Weisz, who appears with Law in Enemy at the Gates, says of him: “Jude is an extremely gifted, talented actor who happens to be beautiful and is starring in movies, but that’s not what it’s about for him. It’s not about the glamour and looking pretty on screen.”

The dark stubble on his chin somehow accentuates those good looks. His hair, blonde on screen for his roles as Dickie Greenleaf and as Bosie, Oscar Wilde’s lover in Wilde, is now back to its natural black and he manages to pass unrecognised – though not unnoticed – through the lobby of the New York hotel where we meet.

His visit is a brief one because he is anxious to return home to Primrose Hill in London, where his wife, actress Sadie Frost, is caring for their three-month-old daughter, Iris; their four-year-old son, Raffy; and Sadie’s daughter, Finley, 10, from her previous marriage to Spandau Ballet singer Gary Kemp.

“Iris is just beautiful,” he says of the latest addition to the family. “She’s also very quiet and I think we deserve a quiet baby because Raffy has been anything but quiet from the word go. With a boy and girl, next comes the white picket fence and a dog, and then I’ll be all set. I’ll have to start smoking a pipe soon.”

Neither Law nor his wife enjoy what he calls “the film-star bit” of their lives, which entails him being the centre of attention. “We find it a little bit boring, actually,” he says. “But we enjoy the escape that we afford each other from our work and from the maelstrom of public life. We enjoy our day-to-day living and because we’ve got three kids we don’t really have much time to talk about the other stuff. We’re too busy wiping up, cleaning up, taking them to school – all of that sort of stuff.”

His burgeoning movie career seems unlikely to entice him to move to Hollywood. “London is my home,” he says, “where I bring up my kids, and because I grew up there I know the education system, I know what’s right and wrong there. I don’t want to have to get to know a new system. It’s nice having somewhere familiar to go back to.”

For an actor whom one besotted reviewer described as “pure Eros and adrenaline”, Law is gratifyingly down-to-earth. His pronounced London accent comes as a shock to those who know him only through the varied characters he has portrayed on screen. He grew up in south London, with schoolteacher parents who named him after the Hardy character. “I was fortunate to have a solid upbringing in a very loving home,” he says.

His wasn’t a misspent youth; he insists that there are no wild episodes in his past. “From the minute I left school to work I’ve been rather boring. I don’t think I ever got up to any real mischief. I’ve been obsessed with my work and that’s always been my drive. Films and theatre were always in the conversations at home and that’s how I became interested.”

He began his acting career at the age of 12 in a youth theatre group and left school at 16 to take a role in the television soap opera Families. In 1994 he drew attention in the London stage production of Les Parents Terribles; he was the only member of the British cast invited to go with the play, renamed Indiscretions, to Broadway, where he was nominated for a Tony award.

He is eager not to turn his back on this theatrical past, and earlier this month, along with Frost, Ewan McGregor, Johnny Lee Miller and Sean Pertwee, he announced that the film company they formed several years ago, Natural Nylon, would be teaming up with the Ambassador Theatre Group to found the Natural Nylon Theatre Company. It will produce plays in the West End over the next two years.

Law and Frost were married in 1997. Whenever possible she and the children accompany him to film locations. They were with him for Enemy at the Gates, despite a temperature near the Polish border of -25 C.

Although supposedly based on a true incident from the Battle of Stalingrad, the film – which co-stars Joseph Fiennes and, at £60 million, is the most expensive ever made in Europe – has come under fire from some critics who claim that director Annaud has blended too much fiction with the fact.

“Vasily Zaitsev was a real-life hero and many of his achievements have been documented,” Law says of his character. “I loved the fact he was an Everyman, a very simple man, who was able to survive the hardship of the environment. So for me it helped that it was cold and filthy dirty and hard work. Getting used to not feeling my toes and my hands helped me make sense of what that battle was about.

“The only problem was that Raffy loved me being a soldier, so when I got home I had to be a soldier for him as well, crawling around the floor.”

Along with the rest of the cast and crew, Law is under strict instructions from Steven Spielberg not to discuss A.I., the project that Spielberg took over when Stanley Kubrick died, and which is due for UK release in September. Little is known about it except that it’s set in a futuristic society ruled by robots.

“Spielberg was far more collaborative than I ever imagined he would be,” Law says. “He really wanted ideas and encouraged people to give their input. Everyone had told me he shoots fast and that was so true – it makes your head spin. I had also been told he is very technical, which I didn’t find at all. He was far more of an actor’s director.”

As soon as he has the chance, Law plans to make a film of the life of the former Beatles manager Brian Epstein, which he has co-written and will produce and star in for Natural Nylon. He has spent five years researching it, and bought Epstein’s diaries when they came up for auction last year. “They run from when he was 15 until he was 27, with sketches and odd little notes – very funny. He was quite a personality.”

Portraying the homosexual Epstein will necessitate some changes to his slender build. “I’ve got to put on a bit of weight to play Brian so I’ll go off to Italy for a couple months and eat pasta and drink Guinness,” he says. He seems positively elated at the thought.