The movie Jude Law will always regret taking: “I kicked myself”
All actors make bad decisions, and Jude Law can certainly attest to that.
During the height of his rise to fame, which included two Academy Award nominations (and just before plenty of media coverage for various non-acting-related bad decisions emerged), the star decided to appear in a movie that would quickly crash and burn.
He didn’t know that, of course, although he should’ve been able to sense it from a mile off, because there was no way that a reimagining of the classic British 1960s film Alfie was going to be any good. The original starred the one and only Michael Caine as the charming Cockney womaniser who finds himself faced with the consequences of his own actions after stringing various women along. Caine played the part just perfectly, balancing a sense of cheekiness with the crushing realisation that you can’t live so selfishly forever, as your decisions might come back and bite you on the behind.
The original Alfie, helmed by Lewis Gilbert, allowed Caine to compete for his first Oscar, which thus saw him rise from his modest position in the British film industry to the shiny halls of Hollywood fame. Perhaps Law thought he could follow in Caine’s footsteps by taking on a character that had previously earned Oscar buzz, but the result was a film that he soon realised was rather “cheesy”.
Charles Shyer’s modernised take on the film just didn’t have the same wit that Caine brought to the original, despite Law’s natural charm, and he now wishes to erase the movie from his filmography. But no can do.
“I just felt it hadn’t elevated [the material] and felt a little light, a little too cheesy,” he admitted to British GQ, “I think it was made for too much money, and I was probably paid too much money, which I underestimated at the time.” What he hoped would be a fun successor to the 1966 film turned out to be a forgettable rom-com without the bite of the first movie, which sees Caine’s Alfie have to deal with some hefty deals, like unplanned fatherhood and tuberculosis.
The 2004 version saw Law play a Cockney cab driver who crawls the streets of Manhattan, although he’s not exactly Travis Bickle. While Robert De Niro’s tormented taxi driver sets his sights on one woman that he becomes enamoured with, in this New York tale, Law’s Alfie isn’t afraid to have multiple sexual partners on the go at once.
“I was in a really strong position [at that time] because I’d just had another [Oscar] nomination on the back of Cold Mountain, and for Alfie to be the film I chose to do quite soon after that, I think was a bad move,” Law revealed.
The actor had quickly become a heartthrob, so a romantic comedy role seemed like the right direction to go in, but sadly, he picked a bad one. “[I] kicked myself that I’d done something that was leaning into the heartthrob and the charismatic lead and it hadn’t worked,” he admitted.
Luckily, the actor was able to bounce back from the terrible film with some much better projects that emerged that same year, like Mike Nichols’ Closer, a movie as funny as it is brutal, adapted from Patrick Marber’s play. He also worked with Martin Scorsese that year on the Academy Award-nominated The Aviator, so it’s safe to say that Alfie didn’t hinder Law’s reputation for too long.
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