Jude Law Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

it was the hardest job i've ever done i spent three weeks living on the italian coast sailing eating great food sunbathing because he wanted me to be very tan i foolishly thought that every job was like that you know that um all jobs in the movies were as hard as that [Music] gattaca i'd only done a couple of very small british films prior to that i was just incredibly excited that the idea of being invited over to los angeles to make a film i was fortunate that it happened to also in my mind be a really wonderful script and a great part in that script jerome morrow was never meant to be one step down on the podium with all i had going for me i was still second best the elements that i loved about it were this idea of him being a fallen god in a way he's told that he's the best of the best the sort of alpha alpha and uh he fails and the idea of what that does to you emotionally and how he treats himself physically in response he sort of drinks and smokes himself to death really or at least into a stupa in a way the way we viewed it was that ethan and i were playing two halves of a hole that these two characters eugene and jerome sort of are one person played by two people was really interesting and exciting playing someone who's paraplegic to me was a real responsibility of getting the physicality right and understanding the emotional journey uh and uh sense of of uh being in a wheelchair when i got to the to the to the set we had this incredible staircase um and i work with uh someone there who was a paraplegic and we just went through step by step literally how he would ascend this this this incredible spiral staircase if he had to at pace uh without help i worked on that with him if i remember rightly for a for a week or so and what's extraordinary is um without the use of your legs you know what other what other parts of the body you use and i remember waking up the next day covered in bruises because you're using your rib cage much more and your elbows it was a wonderful um insight come in the talented mr ripley i had a whole pile of literature that i was reading which were references to harvard grads and that period and i was listening to a lot of jazz music and uh yeah i took i took saxophone lessons i've done this a couple of times in my career where you know you know you only have a few months i think i had three and a half months and of course you dive in initially thinking i want to be perfect at this and you realize you're about 10 years too late you know you so there's only so much you can do you have to really screw down on what you can do and what is possible so i really works primarily on the on the tunes obviously that i was going to have to perform and then anthony was very encouraging in getting me into the location very quickly very early on so he sent me down to iskia where we shot most of it or where we were based when we were filming it was the hardest job i've ever done i spent three weeks living on the italian coast sailing eating great food sunbathing because he wanted me to be very tan i foolishly thought that every job was like that you know that um all jobs in the movies were as hard as that who are you to say anything to me who are you to tell me anything actually i really really do not want to be on this boat both matt and i came out quite battered and bruised from that yeah although the scene the fight the the struggle was very very well choreographed because we were on a tiny boat the camera team were on a sort of pontoon that was strapped to the side of the boat but still the boat had to move and we had to only be we could only obviously look in certain directions because we had to have the sea behind us we had a rubber ore uh which got broken in the first take or bent so after that we had to use a real oar which was slightly troublesome i think that's where the broken rib came from you throw yourself into those things and it was such a brilliant climax to this relationship and turning point for tom ripley when he's frustration and jealousies and fury bubbles over and ends up taking the life of this guy we both got slightly sort of lost in that as you do in those sort of scenes i have a great memory of the two of us lying at the end of the day in the bottom in the hull of this boat looking up at this amazing sky it was baking hot beautiful day but obviously after you've been out in it for seven eight hours and both covered in fake blood which in the sun just gets stickier and stickier and um both kind of lying there everything's sticking together and um but very pleased with ourselves that we pulled it off ai artificial intelligence i think it would have been late 1999 early 2000 you know i got that call that you all will always want to get as an actor which is um that stephen spielberg wants to speak to you and he talked about how he had taken the mantle of a.i it came up very closely with the time that stanley kubrick died so the handover was either early time early on in the production or um had already been handed over but the idea was always that stanley kubrick would produce and stephen would direct and there are a huge number of visuals and and references to the worlds that stephen created that were directly from kubrick's uh drawings and references i went and met stephen in london we talked a lot about this character and then uh i rehearsed with him i was making a film in germany at the time called enemy the gates and i would fly to new york on the weekends back when concord still ran and i would rehearse over the weekend at his at his place and then fly back and carry on working in um in germany that's where we dreamt up all these ideas of the sort of jukebox being inside gigolo joe's chest and that he could click his neck and change music and that he could maybe dance and i said i'll learn to dance i'll go and do dance classes i had about four months and again i went in with all these ideas of being at a dance like gene kelly and fred astaire and of course they said you're probably 20 years too late this time but nonetheless threw myself into that we came up with this very physical uh language that seemed to apply to the character stephen is one of those brilliantly collaborative and um inclusive creative spirits he he he he led us that is me and the choreographer come up with all sorts of ideas that we would film uh and that he would then reference and we would sort of whittle through when we were on set and the same with the makeup i went over i remember did an extensive makeup test i moved over to la and we shot that in 2000 and my uh my eldest daughter was um was born during the making of that so it was a very happy time road to petition it was an unusual process this in a way because in the in the in the in the graphic novel the hitman maguire kind of pops up at the end and he i believe we kind of we we put quite a few characters together he came alive a lot more in the script but there was still this sense of him being slightly ambiguous and very threatening like a kind of angel of death in a way that sort of is just one step behind but but always on the shoulder of um tom's character sam and i had this extensive conversation about how we make someone threatening and memorable and i was aware that you know they had tom hanks they had kieran heinz they had daniel craig all of whom were quite big guys and i thought that you know to make him to make my character sort of threatening would have been wrong to bulk him up and make him physically threatening so he decided and said to sort of shrink him and make this sort of wizard rat-like character someone who's just uh toxic in their soul i'm something of a rarity how's that i shoot the dead dead bodies that is i don't kill them we added all these sort of nails and bad teeth and i i shaved all my hair off back to here and we kind of tried to really turn him really into this bilious little man um obsessed by images so sort of lost in his art which is in itself a sort of expression of of his uh dark ways working on that was was a an extraordinary experience i was sort of out on my own slightly because my character was always um stepping into the scenes just after everyone else had left i remember having an extraordinary experience with with paul newman he lived uh in the apartment block i was in and he lived above me or a couple of floors above he was a really generous guy very funny very forthcoming with uh stories and advice and uh he was lovely i remember with my son i had to keep telling him that we were going for tea with butch cassidy but he wasn't allowed to tell anyone because butch was still on the run which he loved at least he remembers to this day cold mountain again with anthony it was important from him to get me on the location as quickly as possible we shot a lot of the a lot of it in romania we went up very very early and helped construct some of the village together and there were no roads there so we were riding a lot digging a lot chopping trees it was just coming out of the chaichesky era and uh rural romania was 50 years maybe 100 years behind the rest of europe and their you know milking was unpasteurized so so you were pasteurizing your own milk and taking buggies to work on little um muddy hillsides and just being there was quite a a powerful way of stepping into the world of cold mountain anthony did a great job of i think also creating the atmosphere by having musicians on every set he did the same actually on um ripley where we had guy barker and a lot of those jazz musicians stuck around and played with me and played on set just to create a sort of ambience and he did on cold mountain actually jack white the great jack white was a part of that and we would have music most days being played on set just to create an ambience in in wp in wp in repeating the thing doesn't improve it the great tim monach who i've worked with several times worked with me on my dialect coach but we always laugh about the fact that we work for months on my dialect and then i barely talk in the whole film because i've got this injury on my neck that's not true i do talk a little bit it was a grueling shoot that we we started in the baking heat of the summer and went right the way through to sub-sub-zero temperatures up on the mountains in the in the snow i think it was about a six month seven month shoot and uh physically it was it was pretty hard going every day was a sort of uh you know ulysses uh a test for inman and therefore for me and um that that takes its toll after a while [Music] what was extraordinary was uh nicole and renee had their story and i had my story and in a way we both went off and made our own films and then we re-convened at the end when the stories come together and having started together it was an interesting experience to see each other again at the end and check in and find out what their journey had been like [Music] closer we rehearsed it extensively but mostly we rehearsed it sat around a table sharing experiences and really unearthing the details of the the characters and all that's in between because of course it's brilliantly structured in that you only see people meeting and then splitting up and all the rest in between is imagined so we were filling in lots of gaps it never felt stagey you know we always felt once we were on set the sets were very real it was domestic it was it was a lot of it was inside i mean there were a few exteriors obviously but most of it was inside and that maybe lent it a sense of of theatrical experience but but mike nichols wasn't just the most brilliant director and creating truth and honesty and uh and atmosphere this will hurt i've been with anna i'm in love with her we've been seeing each other for a year he began at her opening really it was a case of just knowing the thing inside out and uh and obviously in a situation like that when you have such great players to work opposite on just a four-hander it's testing and it's challenging every day to go to work but of the best kind because you're going to work and and each actor sort of raises your game i want anna back she's made her choice i owe you an apology i fell in love with her my intention was not to make you suffer so where's the apology i apologize don't cry on me i'm sorry sherlock holmes i was sort of intrigued by this project uh and initially just sort of unsure of the whole thing i didn't really know what to expect um but then i met robert and we got on very very well and i thought suddenly meeting him and and and then sitting with him and guy and understanding what guy was bringing it fit and it all suddenly sounded very very exciting it was clear from the get-go that they really wanted to take it out of the musty dusty drawing room physicalize it you know that london the streets of london and certainly the sort of more uh or rather less salubrious and more uh dangerous quarters of london were places where you had to have your wits about you and you had to be ready for a fight you had to know how to fight in order to stay alive and they wanted to take it into those quarters i know that they didn't want watson to be the sort of bumbling idiot with his foot stuck in a waste paper basket following homes like a sort of lost puppy and they wanted to engage him more as a sort of psychic and as someone who was very much observing learning but also contributing and keeping keeping his friend going in a way when you um analyze those books uh one of the characters is a functioning uh drug addict an alcoholic and the other one is a gambler and so they both sort of prop each other up they both have their issues and they both they both have their sort of brilliance and um and so we wanted to look into that area and it was a very exciting way to work we would get in early and run the scenes as scripted and then sort of throw the script out and improvise i compiled this sort of bible of uh quotes from the from the books and we would go through and sort of mine that for um good quotes that we could replace our sort of rather more modern improvised lines with and and then we'd go and shoot it very very quickly so we do that most days so uh as a team we work very much together and uh we all felt like we were very much in it and part of it because we were contributing you know in the writing and in the creative vision of it and then on top of that you had all the wonderful action sequences which are great fun to make because you're dealing with huge camera setups and hundreds of people and explosions and brilliant stunt men and women and yeah fun contagion they've been outbreaks in the past fishing industry suppresses it industrial disease yeah but it's just one man we don't even know just one man on video whatever has the foresight to die in front of a camera the ones we don't see worry me there was absolutely the sense that this was going to happen the great scientists on set with us who had worked with scott burns the writer and with stephen were very learned and experienced individuals who knew what to expect and they both or rather they all said to us that this was going to happen and um it was a case of when rather than if well first of all the way they described it which is exactly as it has happened just made sense it's why you know they they painted out all the the obvious um areas and reasons why it would spread so quickly what's scary is is that you know you learn some you learn on a set on a film like that because you're you're being advised by experts but it doesn't necessarily sit i mean that was ten years ago let's say maybe nine so i'd say that maybe sat in my system scared the hell out of me for all of what 18 months and after that you know i don't know that i was as aware of it as uh i probably was when i came off the back of it but when 2020 started and uh we heard about what was initially happening in china and what fast became apparent um around the world it it it rang alarm bells unfortunately i wasn't hugely surprised it's just that the studies show that there is no proof that works who conducted the studies what defines works the government rushed the trials the lawyers indemnified the drug companies maybe it causes autism or narcolepsy or cancer 10 years from now who knows scott and steven had done a huge amount of research and really sent me all sorts of links to different characters on the online who were gathering and building followings of their sort of rants and predictions and the characters they were sending me to look at actually you know they were far-fetched but they were they were real and they were happening and so he's a cromweedy's a kind of um collection of all of those what's extraordinary maybe more than in a way the uh the virus spreading is how characters like that have really started to pop up as over the last nine years you know our reliance on uh tweets and blogs and uh the voices out there have become more and more heard the young pope i'd seen most of paulo's work and i just wanted to be in that world i get this letter from him and he he talks about this it's a very simple two-page description of this young ish um comparatively young uh uh american man who becomes pope but on becoming pope has a crisis of faith and uh smoked mulberreds and uh drinks cherry coke zero and i was i was immediately hooked i just thought it was the most fantastic premise and in the hands and out of the mind of a brilliant filmmaker so i got him on board very very early on and and he proceeded to deliver this wonderful 10 hour tome of work that we we filmed it from this huge script that we shot like a movie and he then spliced into 10 episodes originally i do not have an image my good lady because i am no one you understand no one only christ exists only christ and i am not worth 45 or even 5 euros i am worth nothing for me it was always the journey of a man looking for his mum and dad trying to understand why his mum and dad didn't want him and realizing that the only way he could come to peace with that was from himself and not from anyone else including god on high and no faith and no institution was ever gonna help him other than him finding peace within and then around him was this incredible world of the inner workings of the vatican which he paolo brought to life with all these wonderful actors so colorfully and eloquently and with great humor and great humanity it's a real juggling act to pull that off to be able to make you laugh make you think make you feel with such grace and paulo has it in you know just in in pet spades [Music] what i love about power's work is that sometimes you don't know whether you're in a dream whether you're in a flashback whether you're in a fantasy whether you're in reality in reality it's just as absurd as uh the dream you were just in and it's for you to make sense of that but sometimes his work is very impressionistic sometimes it's very specific that's the realm we drift into when we when we get told stories you know we shouldn't always know when a door is a door and a wall is a wall sometimes things are meant to melt and merge and you're not going to know where you are your managers feel we obviously had to uh film an awful lot inside the vatican inside the main cathedral and it wasn't really ever gonna happen was it um so it was reconstructed to scale at china cheetah which is the wonderful uh studios in rome where fellini made all his films i believe martin scorsese shot gangs in new york there too the attention to detail the passion thrown into this production was extraordinary we had the tailors we had the vatican tailors making all of our papal robes and gowns we had access to the vatican which meant we could recreate it really to to the minus most minute details so the floor for example and the frescoes on all the walls were photographed in high definition uh for the first time i think in history and were then reprinted onto this incredible sort of vinyl that they could then stick down but actually when you go up to them i mean you could see the texture of the paint and the texture of the marble on the floor so yeah the the the creative teams behind uh the young pope and the new pope were just some of the best i've ever worked with fantastic beasts what um joe rowling did was really fill in the past of albus dumbledore and and i mean an awful lot of his past is is hinted at and referenced in the books of harry potter she filled in a lot of gaps that weren't mentioned in the book she also gave insight and a sense of where he was going and what we hope to explore in in future films i'm actually in the process of making the third fantastic beast at the moment and that's exploring his past in a little more detail from now on i shall know every spell you cast i'm doubling the watch on you and you will no longer teach defense against the dark arts i think what i like doing is is is you know you go to source material and you gain insight reference and and then you you i personally have to go away and sort of flesh that out and create a three-dimensional thinking breathing operating human so that you can step into any given scene or any given scenario and you know how you'd react and how you'd respond and that's to me the fun construction deconstruction part of putting together a character the third day epona look if there's something hurting you here or scaring you you can tell me my old friend felix barra came to me about seven years ago he's the artistic director and the creative mind behind punch drunk theater company and they do these amazing they kind of created immersive theater which is now seen and celebrated worldwide and uh he came to me about seven years ago with the idea of combining mediums that you could what what if you created a something that people could see at home and i'm stealing his description here by the way uh and then as he says if then the fourth wall just sort of collapses and you can go into that world for a live event now initially the idea was that the ritual that was going to carry out be carried out and hint and hinted at during the first three parts of the drama was actually going to be a real festival that you could come and visit and we were hoping to have 10 000 people come to the island and be a part and interact actually on the island with the characters from the drama obviously the pandemic hit and that wasn't going to be real a real possibility so so felix and uh sky and hbo and mark munden one of the director of the first three episodes came up with this brilliant idea with the writer dennis kelly of constructing a single camera that would follow the day's events in real time so a combination of sort of ethnographic slow cinema and live performance and really make an event piece happen and so we went over as a company just a couple of hundred of us of the the smallest element of the cast and this single camera followed us for 12 hours on this important day on the island of ose which is hinted at through the first three episodes i just want to talk the nest the nest was this brilliant script that came to me from sean durkin who uh had been on my mind since for ten years since his his debut film martha marcy maymeline and it was a beautiful look at a family not dealing with the loss of anyone not dealing with a huge drama but just dealing with the each other and what it takes as a family to survive day by day and survive each other in a way that we all have these hidden layers and issues that perhaps our families have given us and we have to work through them together and uh he set it at a time which was in if we look back now in history a real turning point i think when the world became 24 7 and uh the idea of more uh as an answer to everyone's worries and problems was was um seen as a good thing things are dried up here for me what are you talking about i thought things were great i'm running out of options but money's fine right yeah right yeah in a way it was the sort of birth of not greed i suppose in the modern age and rory o'hara the character i play was on on first read really i thought unlikeable but i love the challenge of trying to understand why he would be followed why he would be seductive and why this brilliant wife of his would stick with him so it's a really beautiful love story it's also a look at how perhaps it's a modern fable in in in in that we perhaps got to where we are now because we sold democracy for consumerism and uh it's a look at all those things but it's dealt with with incredible subtlety and grace it's sean constructed a really believable and beautiful family dynamic carrie who plays my wife gives a phenomenal performance as do una roach and charlie who plays my son it's a loving and shocking and at times quite intense phil

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Id: ZE4VBHVrLM8

Length: 30min 42sec (1842 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 26 2020