A Law unto himself
February 21, 2001
By Matt Wolf

He’s the sharpshooting star of the epic new film Enemy at the Gates, his next is directed by Spielberg, but Jude Law is determined not to confuse his career with his life, he tells Matt Wolf.

Jude Law is the real thing, as an actor and a person, although it can’t be easy for him to stay grounded when life takes its surreal turns. Mostly these have been for the best, such as the late-night phone call he took last year in Germany, where he was shooting his latest film, Enemy at the Gates. It was Steven Spielberg on the line, offering Law the co-starring role in his forthcoming movie, A:I. “What do you say?” laughs Law. “I was ready to say, ‘Yeah, whatever. I’ll do it.’ It was like out of a dream – no, that sounds really naff. What it was, was dreamlike, in that there I was lying in bed in Berlin, with Steven Spielberg telling me this wonderful goodnight story.”

But every once in a while his heightened profile doesn’t give cause for cheer. There’s the unwanted photographer, for instance, who may or may not be stalking the north London gastropub where we are seated, just a short walk from the home Law shares with Sadie Frost and three children. His penetrating grey-green eyes occasionally turn towards the window to check. “In London, you like to think nobody cares about who you are and what you’re doing, and they don’t. But once they publish where you live, then, apparently, they have free rein to do what the hell they choose.” He warms to the theme. “I mean, how many photos does anyone want of me taking my son to school? It’s ‘Jude Law goes to school with his son’, and you think, ‘Okay, great, they’ve done it once.’ And the next week, it’s ‘Jude Law goes to school with his son again’. It’s very, very boring,” he says, lapsing into a faux-vampire-movie accent to finish the thought: “Eeez veh-ry, veh-ry boring.”

“Boring” is probably not an adjective much employed in the Law household. The upward spiral of his career could hardly have been more invigorating. It wasn’t terribly long ago that he was making his mark in little-seen films (Wilde and Gattaca remain the two best known, and best, of the crop), interspersed with stints in the theatre, pre-eminently in London and on Broadway as the frisky male crumpet in Jean Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles. Things bolted up a notch or 10 when he played Dickie Greenleaf, the aristo American playboy with the rapier wit and ravishing allure, in The Talented Mr Ripley, and garnered an Oscar nomination and a Bafta en route. Suddenly the world woke up. This Great British Hope was hot.

“Ripley was the first film of mine that a lot of people went to see,” says Law, settling in for a lunchtime chat. He never takes off his jacket during the conversation, which gives the initial impression that he might bolt at any minute, but his rangy body language says otherwise. His legs stretched out across a neighbouring chair, a pack of Marlboros open but untouched by his side, he never once communicates the interview fatigue that must accompany having done “some 400 or so” in recent weeks to promote his new film.

Public awareness of him may have shifted, but Law’s own distinct amiability has not. “I don’t feel like a movie star, and thank God I’m not allowed to,” he says, although even off duty, as it were, he still has stardom inscribed large on a stubbly face blessed with cheekbones once characterised by his friend Sean Pertwee as ones “you could open a letter with”. “The fact is, 200 million people went to see Ripley, and that changes your life. I mean, it is a great movie and it was in the hands of a really fine film-maker, but those are the crude realities of film- making: if a lot of people go and see something, then your career changes.” But he adds, as if to pre-empt an unspoken worry: “The idea that that will ever affect the way I choose work from now on is kind of ludicrous.”

Enemy at the Gates, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, opens in America and Britain next month and looks unlikely to alter anyone’s view that Law is an actor of considerable charisma. He relished doing it and claims to have enjoyed standing around in cold mud for hours at a time after being the fragrant golden boy Dickie in Ripley. “It was fun to play somebody dirty, having played someone so clean.” The film is a formidable physical achievement and by rights should figure in next year’s Oscar race for art direction and cinematography, at least. The human elements of the film pit Law’s propaganda-fuelled Russian country boy, Vassili Zaitsev, against a legendary German sniper, Major König, played by Ed Harris. Given both performers’ razor-sharp eyes, it’s tempting to think of this re-creation of the struggle for Stalingrad as a battle of the orbs.

Law has not long been back from the film’s world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, where the decision to use it as the opening feature might best be described as questionable. “As soon as we arrived there,” says Law, “we felt like we were defending ourselves. And it annoyed me, because I’m really proud of the film. Jean-Jacques doesn’t lay the blame anywhere – it’s not like the Germans are the bad guys and we Russians are the good guys; it’s a bigger film than that. It’s that war doesn’t work, war is an inhumane thing.”

Several commentators have already, somewhat bizarrely, seen a parallel between Zaitsev’s exaltation and Law’s own elevated status as the latest Brit to have broken out of the thespian pack. “But I chose this profession,” Law smiles in response. “Vassili didn’t choose to go to Stalingrad.” Law, though, knows what it’s like to live in the shadow of a myth. “There’s this person that’s written about and talked about that you can’t take seriously,” says Law. “Vassili has the responsibility of a nation on his shoulders when, in reality, he is a very humble and simple man, while my persona is this person that I don’t so much turn off as just step away from.” To that end, he says, he chooses “mostly not to read the stuff or open a lot of the letters about me, because that’s not my reality. There’s always going to be a slight dust storm over ‘Oh, he’s the new young thing, the new hot thing’, but there’s only so long that can last”.

Not for Law the weight of national symbol-making, despite predictions that he will eclipse, say, the Fiennes brothers and rise to the eminence of an Anthony Hopkins or Sean Connery. (And even they have had duds of the order of Law’s risible home-grown gangster clunker, Love, Honour and Obey.) “Luckily, I’ve never been given the role of some great British hope” – well, he has, actually – “and I hope I don’t get given it. I don’t feel any responsibility, really, even to the big companies that finance these big movies. Sure, I want people to see the film, and the idea of people seeing what you’ve done is, of course, very gratifying; it’s a validation of your job. But I don’t lose any sleep over something not being No 1 at the box office.”

Law’s big commercial breakout will no doubt arrive this summer, when he plays a character called Gigolo Joe alongside Haley Joel Osment – his fellow Oscar nominee last year (they lost to Michael Caine) – as an 11-year-old android in A:I, Spielberg’s first film since Saving Private Ryan. The sci-fi movie was a languishing Stanley Kubrick project until Spielberg took it over, following Kubrick’s death, and it seems poised only to intensify the heat around Law, though the actor laughs at press reports that the project has hoisted his asking price into the double-digit millions. “If that were the case, I’d be out of the country on the island I’ve always dreamt of, with my feet up, a large martini and a guitar.”

Instead, he remains rooted to London (“I enjoy LA but I wouldn’t want to live there”) and to family life. That, he says, is his salvation. Baby Iris – born in Santa Monica and hence “an A-mair-uh-can” (Law does a mock cod-Yankee accent) – is now three and a half months old, and his and Sadie’s older child, Rafferty, is four and due to start school in the autumn. “I’m happiest at home hanging out with the kids,” he says – the day after our talk he was heading to Iceland for an outdoorsy weekend with the boys, Rafferty and 10-year-old Fin, Frost’s son by Gary Kemp, the erstwhile rock’n'roller who is currently in the play Art. “Having a family has been my saving grace because the rules – the laws – they apply have narrowed my choices down; they’ve made it a little more straightforward, in as much as I can’t work back-to-back on anything because what would I be like to myself? I’d drive myself to an early grave with guilt and worry for my family, whom I would never see.”

That explains Law’s firm resistance to work just for the sake of it, especially now that he can pick and choose. In March, he heads to America for five weeks on Sam Mendes’s new film, The Road to Perdition, playing a hired killer in Al Capone’s Chicago. Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Daniel Craig and Alfred Molina are in the cast. Ironically, though Law and Mendes are near-neighbours in Primrose Hill and both were bred in the London theatre, the two only met for the first time last year in LA.

Further ahead are the prospects of The Good Shepherd, to be directed by Robert De Niro from a script by Eric (Forrest Gump) Roth, and a long-awaited film for Natural Nylon, the thespian-backed London company of which Law is a founder member, about the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein. Next spring, he returns to the Young Vic, home of his 1999 stage appearance in Tis Pity She’s a Whore, to play the title role in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus; David Lan’s revival will be the first venture of the newly formed Natural Nylon Theatre Company.

“I’ve never understood why Faustus is always done by older actors,” says Law. “For me, he’s a young man because he’s got his life ahead of him. He says, I’m not going to sit and wait for life to deliver all its riches. I’m going to claim them – I mean, demand them – right now.” Aptly enough, Law attended a school, Alleyn’s in Dulwich, named for the first actor to play Faustus. “Christ, I’m nervous enough to say I’m doing Faustus,” says Law, whose trajectory comes endearingly tempered by self-doubt. “I’m still, I have to say, a little nervous about feeling that I’m up to claiming anything.”

Does that mean he is warily looking over his shoulder for the next Jude Law, whoever that may be? “God help them,” he says, laughing. “Then you know it’s time to move on.” Not bloody likely.