What’s it all about, Jude?
November 5, 2004
By Johanna Schneller

It seems like Jude Law appears in every movie that’s coming out between now and Christmas. In anticipation of this Law-athon, I interviewed him last December for Premiere magazine over lunch at a Manhattan hotel owned by Donald Trump. Four photographers with absurdly long lenses stood in the gutter outside, braving the freezing rain, just to get shots of Law sitting by the window, washing down his chicken with a bottle of water whose label bore a photo of, yes, The Donald.

“He even puts his picture on water,” Law said, flashing a grin. “I guess he enjoys it.”

Law’s delight in his own power and acclaim was a tad less obvious. But power and acclaim he has. That night, he shot the final scenes of the remake of Alfie. The next day, he and Julia Roberts started rehearsals for director Mike Nichols on Closer, about the inexplicability of sexual attraction.

The night before our meeting, Law attended the New York opening of Cold Mountain, which would earn him a best-actor Oscar nomination. In the few months of filming before that, he’d saved the planet in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, had an existential crisis in I Heart Huckabees, and played Errol Flynn in The Aviator, Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Howard Hughes. From Closer, Law went straight into narrating Lemony Snickett’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.

That’s six films in two years. It’s a lot of exposure for anyone, but an especial lot for Law, 31, a born leading man, who for 10 years stuck to secondary roles (among them, The Talented Mr. Ripley), and a privacy-loving family man — he shares four children with his ex-wife, actress Sadie Frost. His life was made baldly public in 2003 when he divorced Frost and took up with his luscious Alfie co-star, Sienna Miller, 22.

“I wanted to change up my game a bit, try a new approach,” Law said about his new ubiquity, his posh voice husky with fatigue. The dark circles under his sea-green glassy eyes served only to make them look larger, as his squished, slept-on hair somehow made him more insouciantly glamorous. “I’ve always seen my career as a long journey — I’d like to be working when I’m 80 — so I took my time, got some experience. When these offers arrived [all at once], I saw it as a good wave to catch. Why swim over it, or miss it?”

Especially since all are high-profile roles in well-written films by acclaimed directors — not a Surviving Christmas in sight.

Law has the most riding on Alfie, which opens today. Not only is he the title character and in every scene, he also plays a sexual shark upon whose charisma the entire film rests. On top of that, the original Alfie was very specifically of its time, the 1960s sexual revolution. So why redo it, and why now?

“I asked myself that many times,” Law replied. “I am a huge fan of the film, and I’m not a fan of remakes. So for the longest time I had no interest.”

Alfie director Charles Shyer (Father of the Bride) flew to London to court Law. “He has a dry wit, he’s very sexy, you can believe he’d be a philosophizing womanizer,” Shyer said. “But in reality, he’s such a well-adjusted guy, a great dad and a real partner on the film.”

Gradually it struck Law “that, in the same way that a theatre director may do two or three productions of Hamlet in his lifetime, Alfie was an interesting exercise in using a classic role to look at how we’re doing now. Today Alfie would never get away with the callous way he treated women in the original,” Law said. (Michael Caine, in the 1966 version, refers to female conquests as “it” instead of “she.”) “He’d have to be far more compassionate.

“Which, ironically, allowed us to be far more brutal in his direct address to the camera. So you really get an insight into this guy’s mind.

“We now know, as we always should have known, that women are as capable, smart and independent as any man,” Law continued. “But no matter how capable you are, if you dress and act a certain way, men will think only, ‘Must get you into bed.’ That’s male instinct; that hasn’t changed. Nor has our sense at the end of the film that Alfie has no peace of mind.”

Speaking of no peace of mind: Law’s relationship with Miller turned the set into a paparazzi hunting ground. “They were up on rooftops like snipers,” Shyer said. “Sometimes we had to block off the view, there were so many. At one point in the film, Alfie has a crisis and smashes his phone into his car windshield. The first take, Jude didn’t hit hard enough.

“I said, ‘Pretend the windshield is the paparazzi.’ Then he smashed it so hard the windshield cracked. I was afraid he’d broken his hand.”

Next, Law is set to star opposite Sean Penn, Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet in All the King’s Men, based on Robert Penn Warren’s political novel. And he’s developing another remake of a Michael Caine classic, 1972’s Sleuth. Law will play Caine’s old part, Caine will play Laurence Olivier’s, and Harold Pinter is writing the script. “After an hour’s lunch [with Caine and Pinter] and about three bottles of wine, it was clear that it was going to work out,” Law said. With friends like that, it looks like the Law-athon will continue indefinitely.