In 1922, the poet Carl Sandburg summed up actors since the seventeenth century in a single line of verse: “They all want to play Hamlet.” As it turns out, nearly all of them have—from John Barrymore to Liev Schreiber, Sarah Bernhardt to Ethan Hawke. “Someone once told me that you don’t play Hamlet—Hamlet plays you,” says Jude Law, the latest star to join the brooding pantheon. “He demands such a reveal of your inner feelings and thoughts that you have to open yourself up to him and see where he takes you.”
So far, Hamlet has taken the 36-year-old actor to the West End, where last summer he dazzled critics and drew adoring crowds with his charismatic performance in the Donmar Warehouse director Michael Grandage’s sinuous staging of Shakespeare’s existential tragedy. This month, after a brief stop in Denmark (at the real Elsinore Castle), Law and Co. open in New York for a twelve-week run at the Broadhurst. Despite moments when he felt, as he puts it, “the fear of God,” Law, after a seven-year hiatus, was thrilled to return to the stage, especially in such a demanding role. “You don’t often get to play a character with so many facets, who gives you so many opportunities to delve into your arsenal as an actor,” he says. “Ultimately, it’s why you’ll never have a definitive Hamlet—each actor has a different color, a different tone, and each brings out a different side of him. You can’t capture it all—which is a relief.”
In the London production, Law, with his sculptural features and tousled locks, his wiry frame clad in black jeans and T-shirt, easily captured a certain rumpled aristocracy. As his director observes, “We need Hamlet to walk on, and we need to see the crown prince standing before us.” But Law also captured Hamlet’s mercurial nature with remarkable intensity and self-assurance. He seems to be at his best when giving the audience access to Hamlet’s inner world, as when he delivers the “To be or not to be” speech slouched against a concrete wall beneath a swirl of falling snow. “I realized that I was blessed with an actor who really only plays it in the moment,” Grandage says. “He actually lets the play happen to him on a nightly basis.”
The two decided that their Hamlet had had a wonderful childhood, which allowed Law to react spontaneously to each fresh horror. “We found it astoundingly liberating,” says Grandage. “Both Jude and I benefited from happy childhoods—I know it’s not very fashionable to say that these days—and we were able to draw on that for the building of the character.”
The son of teachers, Law grew up in Lewisham, South London, where, as a schoolboy, he discovered a gift for the stage. “Standing up and pretending to be someone else seemed to come quite naturally to me,” he recalls. “I’m not sure what that says about me. I suppose that, as a kid, when people tell you that you’re good at something, you figure, Well, I’m rubbish at maths—might as well try something else.” Law practiced his craft in regional theater before making a name for himself in London—and later in New York—as a fragile innocent who disports himself sans costume in Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles. But with his almost absurd good looks, tempered by a hint of vulnerability, Law was destined for the big screen. He has built a film career playing characters endowed with, and trapped by, eternal youth—a never-grow-up quality that, judging by the very public vicissitudes of his private peccadilloes, the actor doesn’t always leave on the set.
Hamlet, of course, is the original aging adolescent—society is corrupt, everyone’s a phony, and I want to kill myself—unable to reconcile his ideals with reality. When asked if he sees any parallels between Hamlet’s dilemma and his own life, Law allows that the melancholy Dane’s sense of betrayal and of being misunderstood ring a bell: “He feels hugely let down by the behavior of others, which I can certainly relate to, and yet he’s ultimately sort of singled out as the one who is troublesome and problematical.”
There is something ever-elusive about Law—which makes him perfectly suited to mine the contradictions of a figure that audiences have been trying to pin down for centuries. “You see Hamlet struggling with these questions about why we’re here and what the work of life is, but ultimately, as with all great writing, the answers are really left up to us,” Law says. “At the heart of this character is someone we all recognize as ourselves.”
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