Jude Law has drawn on the turbulence of his personal life for his latest role, in the Anthony Minghella film 'Breaking and Entering', he tells Michael Dwyer
The eyes have it. Jude Law "has a vulnerability that a lot of male actors don't want to show", according to Anthony Minghella, the writer and director. "I think that he's undervalued as an actor. He's punished sometimes because of the way he looks." On the morning we meet, in London, Law is looking handsome in a black pinstripe suit over a sleeveless dark-green vest. The vulnerability discerned by Minghella surfaces, expressed through the hurt in Law's eyes, when the subject turns to the downside of his successful career: being a prime target for paparazzi. The issue arises as Law enthuses about the advantages of shooting Minghella's new film, Breaking and Entering, on his home turf, in north London. "It's always fun when you're working in different places around the world, and living in and learning about a new city," he says. "But it was really nice, a real treat, to be living at home when we were shooting this. I could walk to work and go back home for a few hours when I wasn't needed. I could take the kids to school and pick them up."
But, having been born in London and grown up in the city, can he now walk down the street without donning the regulation actor's disguise of sunglasses and a pulled-down baseball cap? "It's funny," he says. "You can put a cap on and not have to keep your head down. I certainly live a pretty normal life here. Having said that, there are days when I'm being hounded - not every day, but a lot of the time. Unfortunately, we live in a world where everyone wants to know everything, all the time, and I think it takes away part of the fun of acting that we have to go through that all the time."
And it's not just in London or Los Angeles. When Law was in Cork during the summer with Sienna Miller, his actress partner, they were photographed walking down the street. "I know," he says, shaking his head. "It was bizarre, and it made the front page. We were there to go to Ballymaloe." Was he doing a cookery course? "No," he says, laughing. "We were eating there. The food was phenomenal, and there are the most wonderful cliff walks. Anyhow, that photographer left us alone for the rest of the trip. I'm never surprised any more where they pop up. I just feel, here we go again, as long as they get it over with and then just clear off. It's when it's relentless, and when it's in your face, and when it involves the kids that I get really cross."
Law was just a kid himself when he was drawn to acting. He was born in the Lewisham area of London on December 29th, 1972, and his teacher parents introduced him to the pleasures of the theatre at a young age. By the age of 12 he was acting with the National Youth Music Theatre, and four years later he made his television debut, in a musical version of Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester.
When he was 17 Law dropped out of school to join the cast of the soap opera Families, and he also began to work extensively in theatre. His breakthrough came in 1994, when he made his film debut, as a nihilistic joyrider in the low-budget British picture Shopping. "What's prison taught you?" his character is asked at the outset, when he is released after doing time. "Don't get caught," is his sullen reply.
The movie ultimately proved most important in introducing him to his co-star Sadie Frost. They were married in 1997 and had three children before their divorce, three years ago. Law had another role in 1994 that was to prove a breakthrough, earning rave reviews for his performance as the sensual, flighty son in Jean Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles at the National Theatre in London. He was nominated in the outstanding-newcomer category at the Olivier Awards, and, a year later, when the production moved to Broadway, he received a prestigious Tony nomination, at the age of 22.
"That feels like a long time ago now," he says. The play was retitled Indiscretions for US audiences. "I wanted them to call it The Parents Terrible," Law jokes. "But it was a really great experience. A dream come true - many dreams. I'd always aspired to work at the National Theatre."
Returning home after the Broadway success, Law was on the radar of casting agents, and it was only a matter of time before a comparably meaty role in cinema came his way. In the 1997 film Wilde, which featured Stephen Fry as Oscar Wilde, Law burned up the screen as the petulant, narcissistic seducer Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas.
That was all it took. The offers came pouring in, and Law began working for a succession of heavyweight film directors: Clint Eastwood (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), David Cronenberg (eXistenZ), Steven Spielberg (AI: Artificial Intelligence), Sam Mendes (The Road to Perdition), Mike Nichols (Closer) and Martin Scorsese (The Aviator, in a cameo as Errol Flynn).
"That's the blessing of the job," Law says, "being able to work with and learn from all these masters. I've always felt best in great hands, so I try to figure out who's doing what and when, and will they look after me and will I be safe in their hands. Obviously, it's easy to do that when they have the track record."
Some of Law's best work came in films from emerging directors, notably his US film debut, in Andrew Niccol's haunting, melancholy Gattaca. "I love that film," he says. "I think it really stands up. Films are very interesting like that, following their life stories, and the way their reputation can change with time. It's the age-old story of not judging a film by what it makes on its opening weekend, as so many people do. There were very low expectations on Gattaca, because it was a first-time director with a small budget, but people responded to it, and they're still talking about it."
The diversity of his roles - heroes and villains, killers and victims, winners and losers - ensured that Law never fell into the trap of being typecast. "To me, that's the fun of the job, reinventing yourself all the time," he says, "and that's what keeps it interesting. I think that when I was in my 20s there was an element of really trying to show my range, to show what I could do, with all the zest of a 22-year-old, and to build some longevity into my career."
Of all the directors Law has worked with, he forged the strongest bond with his fellow Londoner Minghella. Breaking and Entering is their third film together in seven years, following The Talented Mr Ripley and Cold Mountain, both of which earned Law Oscar nominations. Minghella has said that he would be happy to have Law in every one of his films, and Law has a mutual admiration with the man he calls Ant.
"I really hope we keep this up," Law says, "and that in 20 or 30 years we'll be these old geezers still making films together. By then we probably won't have to talk. Even now we have our own shorthand with each other. We talked about the themes in the new film, but I don't remember ever sitting down and talking about this character with him. I just knew what he wanted, and he knew what I could give him, and that was it. Ant cajoled certain nuances from me, but I think we talked more about the football and the cricket, to be honest, because we were winning the Ashes at the time.
"I think we both like working in friendly environments. We're not very good with hostility and tension. He's a fantastic collaborator. I like his optimism for humankind, his love of humans in all their complexities. I like that he tells stories about real people and not just good people with good lives or bad people with bad lives. There's that grainy area in his love of humankind, which I think is very healthy.
"There's a great sensitivity to him. He's quite complex. He's very much a man's man, a huge sports fan, and very intelligent, and then there's a wonderful vulnerability to him. If that makes us sissies, then I wish there were more sissies in the world, and perhaps we wouldn't be killing so many people."
Extremes of wealth and poverty collide in Breaking and Entering, which is set in present-day London as the King's Cross area undergoes an urban regeneration scheme. Law plays a landscape architect whose high-tech office is burgled several times, bringing him into contact with one of the thieves, a 15-year-old boy (Rafi Gavron) who lives with his mother (Juliette Binoche), a struggling Bosnian refugee. Meanwhile, the architect is undergoing a strained relationship with his wife, a Swedish documentary-maker played by Robin Wright Penn.
"It was a hard film to make - very emotional and complex and at times, upsetting," Law says. "My memory of the film is of all those feelings. There was a rawness to it, and a revealing nature that required digging up a lot of thoughts and feelings. You have to bring a piece of yourself to the job, because you have to keep it true to you, you know, however different the world you're stepping into is. It was very sensitive stuff.
"There were all these elements I'd never played before - being a father, being a modern-day professional, being a guy trying to do the right thing in the modern world, being a guy discovering London. There was a complexity to him that I thought was a real challenge. The layers one can put on oneself in period films are often more straightforward. In a modern film, getting him right, making him real and accurate and truthful, for some reason began to feel more of a challenge. I wanted the modern audience to say, 'Oh, I know someone like that.'
"I think the themes and situations this film deals with, and struggles with, are ones that we all, as adults, go through. There were shades to myself in it - being in relationships, trying to make them work, trying to do the right thing by relationships, messing up, being a good person, doing bad things. It's hard, but forgiveness is a phenomenal asset to have, because we all mess up. Sometimes it's healthy to take a step back and take another look at something we think we know and consider it again from another angle." London is effectively one of the major characters in the film, as Minghella explores the changing physical and cultural landscape of the city. "This film is very true to London as it is now, as it goes through these changes," Law says. "Then there are things in it that are timeless. I don't think adults will be any better in relationships in 50 years' time than they are now.
"London now is a very different place to the London where I grew up, and I particularly notice the changes when I've been away for a few months on a film set somewhere else. And I notice it in looking at it through the eyes of my own children, especially when I think back to how things were when I was a boy and how different they are now.
"Some of the simplest things have changed, such as when are the kids old enough to walk to school on their own? That age has been going way up. I remember walking to school when I was seven or eight, even though it was through some fairly hairy, though not dangerous, parts of London at the time, and then taking the bus from when I was about nine.
"Now I'm scared about letting my kids walk to the end of the street. I don't know if it is any more dangerous, but I certainly approach it as if it is. And that's not even touching on the economic divides within the city or the changes they have made to areas without ever thinking about basic needs like shops for the people who live there."
I mention the coincidence that John Boorman has taken the microscope to Dublin in The Tiger's Tail, albeit with a much more caustic commentary. "Really?" Law says. "That sounds interesting. I look forward to seeing it." By another coincidence, Law's next film, The Holiday, which opens here a week after Breaking and Entering, has a narrative that inevitably recalls another recent Irish film, the Maeve Binchy adaptation Tara Road, in that both movies deal with women swapping homes on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In The Holiday, directed by Nancy Meyers, the women are played by Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet. "I was attracted to it because it was a style of film I'd never done before," Law says, "and I enjoyed the challenge of embracing all that lightness and playing the rhythm of the humour. But it wasn't camp. It wasn't schlocky. It was very careful and very romantic.
"As soon as I knew the cast, I wanted in. Cameron is brilliant. She's a great actress, but she's got that thing that you can't buy, you know? Kate's a great friend, and she's just quality. And then there was Jack Black, and Eli Wallach, who's about 90 now." Law's prolific output continues with the new film from the Hong Kong stylist Wong Kar-wai, My Blueberry Nights, which features the singer Norah Jones, in her film debut, as a young woman on a soul-searching journey across the US.
Does Wong chain-smoke and wear sunglasses all the time on the set, as he seems to do anytime he's in public? "Yeah," Law says, laughing. "We shot the whole thing at night, and he still wore his sunglasses. He's a very charming man."
Although he is one of the most in-demand actors in film, Law intends to return to his roots as a stage actor whenever the opportunity arises. "To keep going back to it is like doing a refresher course. It revitalises you. You have to reinvent the piece every night and keep it invigorated, keep it new, and you have to learn how to do that for yourself. When I was starting out I was told that theatre acting is all big and film acting is all small, but I learned that that's not always the case. I just saw Harold Pinter on stage in Krapp's Last Tape, and he barely moved. In fact, when the lights came up, he didn't move for about two minutes. It was the most engaging, powerful performance, and that's one man talking to a tape machine. The details in it are tiny."
Law's next commitment is the Pinter-scripted new version of Sleuth, the clever, devious cat-and-mouse thriller first filmed in 1972 with Laurence Olivier as a mystery novelist and Michael Caine as the hairdresser having an affair with his wife. Caine plays the older man in the new film, which Kenneth Branagh will start filming in January, with Law as his nemesis. Will Law go incognito as a hairdresser to prepare for his role? "No, the character is not a hairdresser in this one," he says. "Pinter has come up with some very interesting changes for this. It's certainly going to be a lot of fun on that set - a lot of good stories. I know that I'm going to spending my days on it listening to some great yarns."
Breaking and Entering is released on December 1st. The Holiday opens on December 8th