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Laying Down The Law
Laying Down The Law
No more Jude the obscure
as Britain’s hottest star/producer hits Hollywood.
Anew name has joined the
growing list of British
actors currently in demand
in Hollywood. After making
his Stateside debut on the
recent science fiction drama, Gattaca, London born Jude Law now has roles in major new movies by Clint Eastwood, Anthony Minghella and David Cronenberg.
Things have happened so fast that he had to pinch himself when he arrived on location in Savannah, Georgia, to take direction from Eastwood on Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”I turned up in Savannah, this hotbed of old school America, and I’m this guy from Lewisham. And there was Kevin Spacey and Clint Eastwood and part of me thought, ‘what am I doing here, where do I fit in?’” He fitted in as Spacey’s gay lover whose violent death is the crux of the story.
And how was it working with the great man? “On an Eastwood set you turn up and it’s really quiet and everyone is hanging around drinking Coke and he literally just walks over and says ‘OK, the camera’s going to come round here and you say this part and the camera pans away’ and that’s literally all he said. And then it was ‘Action’ - and we move along like that.
“What is great about working with Eastwood is that he instills confidence in you. You feel, this is Clint Eastwood and if he wants me, I must be right for the part. And if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it well.”
Though an award-winning stage actor, Law, now 25, is probably best known so far in Britain for
his eye-catching appearance as Lord Alfred Douglas in Wilde. Despite that ordinary South London background, he seems particularly suited to playing petulant aristocrats. In Gattaca, he once again played someone of impeccable breeding.
It was a futuristic tale where the haves and have nots of society are determined purely by genetics. He landed the part while he was over in America appearing in Indiscretions on Broadway: “I had done a spell of four years in the theatre and reached the point where I felt brave enough and interested enough to look for a film script. This was one that jumped off the page and so unique, detailed, specific and even epic in a lot of ways
From Gattaca, Law moved on to Eastwood’s movie and that was followed by a romantic come- dy, Music From Another Room, and Eugene Onegin, directed by Ralph Fiennes’ younger sister, Martha, but has mixed feelings about his Hollywood career.
“The hardest problem to solve about working abroad is I don’t want to be away from my family for lengthy periods,” he says. My wife , actress and Shopping co-star Sadie Frost, also works here and in America and we try and do it so that she’s working at times and I’m working at times “But I would never move over there because the novelty would wear off eventually. It’s nice to visit and enjoy the sun and go swimming and go to Ben Franks for breakfast and drive around in big American cars. But there’s too much
going on in the UK.
Now is the time to stay and make the most of
Photos top left: Jude Law in Gattaca, centre; framed opposite his alter ego Ethan Hawke in Gattaca, top right; in Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil.
chance to play a part in the new modern film
the
industry.” To that end he is involved with other members of the Britpack acting fraternity in a pro- duction company
First up is a story built around the 19th cen- tury gentleman adventurers, The Hellfire Club, to be filmed at the ancestral home of one of the Hellfire members, Lord Dashwood. His co-produc- ers include Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Sean Pertwee and new-found American chum, Gattaca co-star Ethan Hawke.
“It’s a long process because we all write notes and send them back and forth to each other. Then it comes back to the writer, but we’re on our sec- ond draft. The difficulty is that with the emergence of Star Wars it’s difficult to find a window for Ewan. It’s a juggling process. We’re meeting with direc- tors and looking to workshop it this summer and start shooting in 1999.”
It may become increasingly difficult for Jude Law to find his own window because now he’s off back across the Atlantic, to co-star with Jennifer Jason Leigh in eXistenZ, written and directed by Canadian David Cronenberg in Toronto.
That will be closely followed by The Talented Mr Ripley, Anthony Minghella’s long-awaited fol- low-up to his sensational multi Oscar award-win- ning movie, The English Patient. The wait, you can
EXPOSURE • 30 & 31
facing the camera