In Sean Durkin’s new film The Nest, Law plays an 80s broker whose financial deals destroy his marriage. He and the director talk about making his character likable – and how US can-do culture changed class-ridden Britain
For a few months in 2000, Jude Law’s working week consisted of shooting the war epic Enemy at the Gates in Berlin from Monday to Friday, before hopping on Concorde on Friday eveningto fly to New York to rehearse for AI with Steven Spielberg for the weekend. On Sunday night he was back on Concorde to Berlin. “I was quite new to movie acting back then,” he says. “I just assumed that was what it was like all the time.”
It wasn’t. Not even for an actor like Law, who has been in healthy demand on both sides of the Atlantic ever since. But it was one of the first times that the US felt like a real place to him, rather than a distant fantasy. “The memory as a kid was always, we were waiting for what happened in America,” says Law. “So, you know, films were always shown in America first. I remember hearing about Indiana Jones or the next Star Wars, and you’d see pictures on the news of people queuing for the cinema in the States and you’d think: ‘Well, when are we gonna get it?’ There was always this sense of it being ahead. They did a phenomenal job of selling us this lifestyle that just seemed so other and glamorous and cool.”
