It was while appearing on stage at a theatre in London that Jude Law realised that he wanted to play more aggressive, masculine roles.
"I played a part in the Eugene O'Neill play Anna Christie, and I was playing this man [Mat], he was described as this gigantic beefcake, Irish sailor and so I trained for six months and put on a stone of muscle," Law recalls in an interview. "I loved playing him and I thought that I really want to play this guy on film because no one has seen me do that. Those roles usually go to Tom Hardy or Hugh Jackman. People don't think outside the box when they cast."
Then the script for Dom Hemingway landed on his six-pack. Playing the eponymous lead Dom, Law gives a performance that’s comparable to that delivered by Sir Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast. “I’m playing a kind of petty criminal – there is a breadth and a variety to it.”
Written and directed by New Yorker Richard Shepard, the film follows Hemingway's travails as he comes out of a British jail and tries his best to avoid going back in. He also has family issues to resolve, most notably with Evelyn, his estranged daughter. She is played by Emilia Clarke, the 26-year-old star best known for playing Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones.
“I wrote a letter to Jude Law’s character Dom, penned from my character Evelyn, while Dom was in prison,” Clarke recalls. “During the production, Jude kept the letter in Dom’s wallet. It was cool that Jude wanted to do something like that, especially with someone like myself who is relatively new to the acting world and still enjoys those kind of things, exploring characters and the process of it.”
For Clarke, it was a welcome change. "It was a departure from what I do regularly in Game of Thrones. It was nice to do something contemporary and in a world that I know a lot about."
Law says that Dom Hemingway – alongside his recent roles in Anna Karenina and Side Effects – marks a new direction for his career.
“Your 20s and 30s can sometimes be like minefields for an actor – you have dodged an awful lot of stuff that is thrown at you, whether you are the new hot thing, a sex symbol, or an ‘it boy’, whatever it might be.
“Sometimes that other stuff is a distraction, then you find yourself protesting too much, saying ‘I’m an actor, take me seriously,’ which sounds pretentious.”
And now the 41-year-old is getting parts that excite him. “Just because of life experience, characters in their 40s and 50s are going to have a bit more weight and complexity to them. I’m looking forward to the next 20 years.”
• Dom Hemingway is out today in UAE cinemas
artslife@thenational.ae
