“Forever cast that shadow”: the career-defining scene that became Jude Law’s blessing and curse
Jude Law has been around long enough now to have played a teenager in an early TV adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, plus Dr Watson in a movie version of it, and on top of that, the great wizard Dumbledore too, which is some going for someone who only just turned 53.
Because of that longevity, he has racked up a career that now encompasses almost 90 different films and TV shows over five decades, including career-making turns in the likes of the sci-fi Gattaca with Ethan Hawke, another in Spielberg’s AI Artificial Intelligence, rom-coms like 2006’s The Holiday and more recently in the hit drama The New Pope.
He is also possessed of the most impressive display of holding on to a hairline that by all sensible guesses should have meant there was nothing left about 20 years ago, and yet still functions in making him ludicrously attractive, which is just unfair, quite frankly. Law made his name in the theatre as a young actor, receiving a Laurence Olivier Award nomination in 1994, leading to a spell on Broadway, which then led to a Tony Award nomination, showing that whatever the British were impressed by, the Americans were too.
His first main film role came in 1994 with Shopping, an action thriller with Sean Bean and Sadie Frost, but things really started to happen for the Londoner in 1997 when he won huge acclaim for Wilde, a biopic of the English author, as well as a Clint Eastwood joint called Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Now one of the most in-demand young actors in the industry, Law’s pivotal role was undoubtedly in 1999’s The Talented Mr Ripley, which featured a staggeringly talented cast including Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Cate Blanchett.
A psychological thriller set in the upper-class New York society of the 1950s, it was a massive hit commercially and critically, earning five Academy Award nominations, including a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ nod for Law, in addition to Golden Globe and Bafta nods, and while Law had many iconic moments in the movie, for which he had to learn the saxophone, he certainly spends plenty of it soaking up the sun either topless or shirt open, leading to his becoming one of the more desired human beings on the planet.
Law is convinced for his part that it was the making of his career, however, telling GQ about a particularly lascivious scene on a sunlounger and saying: “That’s the still I’ll be showing the kids and the grandkids. I mean, if I look at (Ripley) positively, obviously that role changed my life. It changed my career. It gave me incredible opportunities and opened doors for several years. But if I look at it cynically, it’s like, ‘Oh, did I sort of lean in to playing the good-looking guy? And did it forever cast that shadow over me?’”
If it did, then it certainly didn’t do him any harm. For the next five years or so, Law worked with a string of legendary directors, including Spielberg, Sam Mendes, Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols, and Antony Minghella, and for the latter’s Cold Mountain in 2003, he picked up his second Academy Award nomination.
Most recently, Law was seen in Netflix’s Black Rabbit with Jason Bateman, and now he has a few exciting projects in development, not least a third Sherlock Holmes movie with Guy Ritchie, but also a TV series about the famed Vegas magicians Siegfried and Roy called Wild Things.
