Jude Law is Back on Track

“There’s a moment,” he says, “when you suddenly realize that there are some [people who the press] like to gossip about and others they don’t. Quite how one controls that I have no idea. I think I’ve made it obvious I don’t enjoy the attention.

“Look,” he says. “I don’t want to go on too much about this [but] the invasion of photographers in a lot of people’s lives is too much. If you took their cameras away, they would be stalkers and freaks. Most of them
are anyway, or at least they look like it. They follow me from here to the set every day, hoping I’ll fall, hoping I’ll get hit by a car, hoping a bird will **** on my head. And then suddenly there’s a story. People either know that or they don’t.”

The prices of notoriety to one side, how is he now, having apparently weathered the storm?

“I feel a lot happier,” he says. “The only thing I’d add is that just prior to all of that [bad press] I’d been through a divorce. It certainly felt like I was changing my private life, my momentum, my direction and everything. And [it] feels now like the cards are settling and I’m getting a sense of peace and calm in both personal and public life. So things are good.”

Law’s travails have not been entirely limited to his private life. In his career, too, he has suffered setbacks and public indignity. He hasn’t appeared on screens in Britain since January 2005, when he starred in Closer, Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Patrick Marber’s scalpel-sharp vivisection of contemporary relationships, which had been a stage hit in London and New York. Prior to that, he had appeared in four Hollywood films within the space of as many months, as well as supplying the voice for Lemony Snicket, hero of the kids’ cartoon.

In date order of their UK releases, they were: Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, a CGI-sodden Thirties fantasia, which he also helped produce; Alfie, an attempt at a post-feminist update of the chirpily misanthropic 1966 Michael Caine hit; I Heart Huckabees, a chaotic meta-comedy in the manner of Charlie Kaufman; and The Aviator, Martin Scorsese’s evocation of the early career of Howard Hughes, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the obsessive-compulsive playboy and Law in a brief cameo as Errol Flynn.

Much was made of all this activity, particularly given the fact that none of these films was an unalloyed success, either critically or commercially (although Closer went on to make a good deal of money). Sky Captain… and Alfie, the two in which he had lead roles, received particularly discourteous welcomes. And since so many of us these days are barstool Hollywood agents, Law’s career choices began to be scrutinized, criticized and occasionally even lampooned.

Most mortifyingly, he was sent up at the 2005 Oscars, by the awards’ host, Chris Rock. “They like to say ‘Oh, there’s a hundred stars here tonight,’” said Rock. “No, there’s not! There’s only four real stars; the rest are just popular people… You want Tom Cruise and all you could get is Jude Law? Wait! It’s not the same thing! Who is Jude Law and why is he in every movie I have seen in the last four years? He’s even in the movies he’s not acting in. He’s making cupcakes or something. He’s gay, he’s straight, he’s American, he’s British…”

It doesn’t look so bad - or funny, for that matter - when you write it down, but it was enough that Sean Penn was moved to mount a defense of his friend, describing Law as “one of our finest actors”.

Recently I asked Penn if, in retrospect, he felt he’d done the right thing by rushing so publicly to Law’s aid. “It wasn’t something I felt I had to do,” he told me. “But it wasn’t funny to me. It wasn’t a good joke. It was a mean time to pick on [Jude].”

Looking back on this period, Law says he wouldn’t change a thing. That’s not to say mistakes weren’t made; just that mistakes are part of life, and not necessarily anything to be afraid of.

“I can’t regret any of it,” he continues. “What are you going to do? Go back and erase it? But if you want to really analyze it, Sky Captain… was a pet project, showcasing this extraordinary young talent [director Kerry Conran]. Alfie was a challenge I felt I’d never confronted, playing that sort of clearly alpha-male type role, and doing a remake.

“I remember at the beginning of that year thinking that these were all very diverse parts. It didn’t really strike me that it would be a problem when they all came out. Maybe I was naive but I’m an actor, I have nothing to do with when things are released. I didn’t put out any films. The bloody studios did.”

The trouble was also, he thinks, “the power of the media. As soon as one person said, ‘Oh, there’s a lump of your films coming out’, that became the focus and so suddenly people were able to go, ‘Well that one wasn’t very good, we didn’t like that one, why did you do that?’”

This may well be true, that a sort of domino effect in the press creates a received wisdom that mutates into an attested fact - Jude Law’s films are rubbish and his career’s in the crapper - rather than the unsubstantiated, personally motivated, often plain inaccurate opinionating it actually is.

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