Whether he’s playing a surly philosopher, a hustling restaurateur or Vladimir Putin, the 52-year-old is one of Hollywood’s most daring A-listers.
Jude Law has long been a performer of uncanny malleability. Need A-list presence and bankable appeal? The 52-year-old fits the bill. He also is an actor’s actor, happy – no, eager – to bend his intonation and essence to a character’s will. And Law does it all with a tireless work ethic that has kept him in the public eye for more than a quarter-century.
Yet the Englishman still suffers from impostor syndrome in the company of a cinema legend. As Law sits down at the Greenwich Hotel, a Tribeca establishment co-owned by Robert De Niro, he’s swiftly drawn to the silhouette of a trench-coated figure emblazoned on the wall behind me. “This,” he marvels, “is an awesome setting.” Thinking out loud, he racks his brain for the movie from which the image is drawn. “I don’t know what the film is,” he mutters, “but I’m going to guess it’s De Niro.”
Moments later, as if conjured by Law’s curiosity, De Niro appears. It turns out the two-time Oscar winner was entertaining in the adjacent courtyard when he clocked Law’s arrival. As the pair exchange pleasantries, De Niro informs Law that the silhouette isn’t his. (I later discover it’s Orson Welles from the 1949 film noir The Third Man.) When De Niro returns to his seat and it comes time to address the matter at hand – Law’s craft – one of our finest living actors is suddenly at a loss.
“I feel slightly embarrassed talking about this in the presence of the great Robert De Niro,” Law concedes. “Part of me is like, ‘Well, let’s just go and ask him because he knows better than I do - way better than I ever will.’”
Still, there’s no star who transforms quite like Law. Consider his two Oscar nominations, both for films from the late director Anthony Minghella. As the polished playboy Dickie Greenleaf in 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Law paired outward entitlement with inner conflict to intoxicating effect. Four years later, he hid behind a burly beard and Southern accent as a wounded Civil War deserter in the romantic epic Cold Mountain.
Asked if he’s ever used his natural speaking voice for a role, the Southeast London native takes a moment to ponder, then concludes he hasn’t. “I’ve got a very particular quality,” he says. “I’ve never played someone who comes from Lewisham.” It’s a matter-of-fact response from an actor so immersed in process and precision that the idea of phoning in a performance or leaning on his intrinsic assets – the piercing eyes, the disarming charm, the steely vitality – is unfathomable.
“He keeps surprising us,” says Jurnee Smollett, Law’s co-star in the 2024 thriller The Order. “He keeps making a left when you think he’s going to make a right, and is still so hungry to grow and learn.”
In the past year alone, Law has portrayed a world-weary FBI agent in The Order, a conniving space pirate in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew and a surly philosopher in Ron Howard’s Eden. In a particularly imposing assignment, he inhabits Russian President Vladimir Putin in The Wizard of the Kremlin, a trenchant satire that recently drew a 10-minute ovation at the Venice Film Festival. Next, he’ll be seen as a glad-handing Manhattan restaurateur in Black Rabbit, a limited series streaming on Netflix.
Also starring Jason Bateman as the scruffy older brother to Law’s character, the kinetic crime drama meets at the intersection of The Bear, Succession and Uncut Gems. Driving the car is Law’s Jake Friedken, a fake-it-till-you-make-it live wire whose furrowed brow and bulging eyes tend to betray his cocksure veneer.
“There’s a lot of flaws to this [character] that you discover that Jude is very capable and willing to show,” Bateman says. “I think that’s probably got a lot to do with the fact that he’s very in touch with his humility and his humanity. He’s just kind of a real guy – who happens to be good-looking and talented and famous.”
Law still reads as sufficiently suave while sporting sweats and a tank top on this early August afternoon, having just landed in New York following a summer vacation in France. Acknowledging myriad malaises – fatigue, jet lag, dehydration – he declines coffee or a cocktail and instead downs a carafe of sparkling water. “If I start swirling and dribbling or literally falling off my chair, at least I have an excuse and you don’t have to say, ‘He’s drinking martinis,’” Law says with a laugh. “You can say, ‘He’s drinking water and he was clearly tired.’”
Jude Law? Tired? For an actor so prolific that Chris Rock famously turned his ubiquitousness into an Oscars monologue gag, the notion is startling. His filmography isn’t just busy; it’s littered with treasures from our greatest auteurs, including – deep breath – Martin Scorsese (The Aviator, Hugo), Steven Spielberg (A.I. Artificial Intelligence), Sam Mendes (Road to Perdition), Nancy Meyers (The Holiday), Mike Nichols (Closer), Steven Soderbergh (Contagion, Side Effects), Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel) and Guy Ritchie (Sherlock Holmes and its sequel).
“His contribution to the cinematic canon,” Smollett says, “is so massive.”
Raised by two educators with a thirst for theatre (his mother directed local plays and his father acted in them), Law was all of 5 years old when he first stepped onstage. “I grew up in a house where there was always something happening,” says Law, whose older sister, Natasha, is an accomplished painter. “So I suppose my wiring is such that one should always be doing something.”
After returning to series television with Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope in 2016, Law at last surrendered to decompression and took the longest hiatus of his career. “I just sat on the sofa and read books all year,” he says. “It was amazing. But I also feel like I kind of missed a wave or two. Who knows where that would have taken me?”
Law promptly plunged into art house films such as Vox Lux, The Nest and Firebrand. But he also waded further into blockbuster waters, playing the two-faced Yon-Rogg in Captain Marvel, a young Albus Dumbledore in two Fantastic Beasts movies and a lightsaber-wielding scoundrel in Skeleton Crew. Anti-heroes and antagonists, mentors and manipulators – as the matinee idol roles of his youth fell by the wayside, Law’s choices got more interesting and his work got more daring.
“I was thrilled to watch him make this incredible and delicate pivot to occupying both lanes of being a movie star and a leading man but also a character actor,” says David Lowery, who directed Law in the 2023 Disney adventure Peter Pan & Wendy and two episodes of Skeleton Crew. “That pivot is, I think, very difficult to pull off, and he has done so perfectly.”
Even after a chunk of Law’s snarling but sympathetic portrayal of Captain Hook in Peter Pan & Wendy was excised via orders from above, Lowery admired the nuance that – amid the pirate ships and pixie dust and airborne tweens – pervaded his performance. “We both were disappointed that the version of Captain Hook that we filmed did not make the final cut,” Lowery says. “But I’m always amazed at how I can see the glimmers of all the work that we put into it that got left on the cutting room floor.”
For his part, Law chalks up such compromises to the “collaborative spirit of film-making”. But he also has become increasingly interested in exerting more control over his career. In 2017, Law and his former assistant Ben Jackson co-founded Riff Raff Entertainment, a production company that ushered The Order and, now, Black Rabbit to the screen.
“It’s a very odd job,” Law says of acting. “If you don’t get involved behind the camera, you’re really only being perceived by what other people think you can do.” Describing Riff Raff’s guiding principle, Jackson quotes Law. “Jude has a phrase, ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ which we sort of stick to,” he explains. “It’s always interesting to watch something where you think you know what you’re going to get, and then it maybe flips on its head.”
Law had just started work on The Order when its screenwriter, Zach Baylin, asked him to consider a series he was developing with his wife and creative partner, Kate Susman. Inspired by the rise and fall of many a trendy New York eatery, Baylin and Susman had cooked up a concept about the seedy underbelly that might sustain such a hot spot.
“A restaurant looks glamorous,” Baylin says. “Then you come to the end of the night and everyone’s sleeping on the trash, and there’s broken bottles and there’s rats. I think that Jake, Jude’s character, sort of embodies that idea.”
Having got to know New York in his 20s, when he earned a Tony nod for the tragicomic play Indiscretions, Law recognised the grungy tale they wanted to tell and threw his producing weight behind Black Rabbit – despite some trepidation about his on-screen contribution.
“There were a lot of potential pitfalls,” Law says. “Is he just a sort of a sleazy nightclub owner? Is he a bit of a jerk? Honestly, I took him on more shouldering the responsibility as a producer who wanted to get the thing made. Then, as an actor, I always like challenge.”
It was the fraught fraternal bond between Law’s hustling Jake and Bateman’s hot mess Vince that Law locked in on as Black Rabbit’s hyperstimulated heart. Finding Jake began by pinpointing the right Bateman-adjacent New York accent. (“I said to Jason early on, ‘We’re obviously from Coney Island. What are you doing?’” Law recalls. “He said, ‘I’m doing Jason, so you better follow me.’”) Although Jake projects a larger-than-life personality, Law reined in his interpretation of a man whose lavish lifestyle – a penthouse apartment he can’t afford, a flashy Jaguar that’s falling apart – belies his deep-seated troubles.
“You don’t ever really get the sense that he’s flexing with his performance,” Bateman says. “He’s just trying to be real, and not really do any acting.”
That’s not to say it was an effortless outing from an actor who, before production commenced, sat down with Baylin and Susman to dissect every line of dialogue in the eight-episode series. “It’s constantly surprising and exciting,” Susman says, “to have someone with his reputation work so hard and dig in so deep.”
Law showcases his character’s compartmentalisation in Black Rabbit’s third episode. As the camera whips through the titular restaurant during a 75-second tracking shot and Jake stumbles upon many a VIP guest – some he’s considerably happier to see than others – Law delivers a clinic in careening emotion. Warmth. Exasperation. Anger. Consternation. Surprise.
Although Law and Jake don’t share much, the actor did relate to the exhaustion that comes with an ever-cascading avalanche of obligations and anxieties.
“I know that sense of juggling responsibilities, feeling at times like you’ve reached a point in your life where you want to sit down a little longer than you do in a day,” Law says. “The responsibilities of private life, the responsibilities of work, the responsibilities of people that depend on you. I think anyone who hits their 50s has the opportunity to think, ‘Okay, I don’t know if I can keep going at this pace.’”
As a father of seven – including a toddler – who splits his spare time between London and New Orleans, Law has accepted there are only so many hours in the day. It pains Law, once an avid theatregoer, to say that he doesn’t see much onstage nowadays. His film and television consumption is largely limited to projects connected to Riff Raff. Even then, he tends to watch things 20 minutes at a time, after the kids are put to bed and before he crashes himself.
“Such is the life,” he says, “of the parent of a youngster.”
Now, Law is preparing to play eccentric magician Siegfried Fischbacher opposite Andrew Garfield’s Roy Horn in the Apple TV+ limited series Wild Things, which begins production this fall. It’s another out-there choice for an actor who revels in the eclectic. Case in point: Audiences will soon see him on the big screen as Putin in The Wizard of the Kremlin, Olivier Assayas’s fictionalised film about a spin doctor abetting the Russian autocrat’s rise to power.
“Given what is happening currently, it’s just a really smart and insightful point of view or, shall we say, spotlight on the political ramifications that perhaps got the Russian seat of power to where it is now,” Law says of the film, which is being positioned for an award-season release. “There was something immediately terrifying and incredibly exciting about the potential of playing someone who is alive and in the position that Vladimir Putin is in.”
Attempting to articulate a through line for his body of work, Law can only speak in sprawling terms. “I’m going to sound possibly very pretentious,” Law says. “But in the end, it has to be about some kind of truth.” Looking forward, what principles will shape his choices? “I think,” he replies, “what I just said is perhaps my mantra.”
The comment has barely left Law’s lips before he purses them like he just bit into something horribly sour. “Oh my God,” he says. “I sound even more pretentious.” Law chuckles at his high-minded rhetoric. “If you do write all that,” he says before adopting a comically snotty affect, “please, please put in, ‘His mantra is the truth.’”
At this point, we’re over an hour into a conversation that, just as Law feared, has unfolded within earshot of De Niro. It speaks to his blend of hero worship, deeply English humility and jet-lagged delirium that Law can only shake his head, cackle and exclaim in self-deprecation.
“What a wanker!”