“Who is Jude Law?!” Asked by Chris Rock during his opening monologue at the 2005 Academy Awards, the question was both rhetorical and an accusation. It came after a three-month stretch at the end of 2004 when Law appeared in six movies, a gaudy statistic that rose closer to infamy every time one of those projects flopped. Rock, hosting the Oscars for the first time, was haranguing Hollywood for making movies too quickly and producing too few real stars. “If you can’t get a movie star: wait,” Rock quipped. “If you want Tom Cruise and all you can get is Jude Law … wait.”
It was the sour cherry atop what had been a rough several months for Law, who had appeared — in one manner or another — in six movies that opened between September 17 and December 17, 2004: the digital adventure pastiche Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the “existential comedy” I Heart Huckabees, the rom-com remake Alfie, the four-hander infidelity drama Closer, the Scorsese-directed epic biography The Aviator, and the darkly comedic children’s-book adaptation Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. While some of those movies succeeded more than others, Law’s reputation as a movie star on the rise took a pronounced hit. And the backlash to that season changed the immediate trajectory of his career. With the exception of the four-lead rom-com The Holiday and Warner Bros.’ Sherlock Holmes movies — where he took second-billing to Robert Downey Jr. — Law didn’t star in another major studio movie for 14 years, until Fantastic Beasts cast him as Dumbledore (and even there, Eddie Redmayne was the star of those films).
Law wasn’t in the audience of the 2005 Oscars for his dressing down, though his Closer co-stars Clive Owen and Natalie Portman laughed nervously as Rock complained that Law had been in “everything” that year. “Even the movies he’s not acting in,” Rock joked, “if you look at the credits he made cupcakes or something. He’s in everything! He’s gay, he’s straight, he’s American, he’s British — next year he’s playing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in a movie.”
Another of Law’s co-stars, Sean Penn (from the still-filming All the Kings Men), apparently stewed on Rock’s withering assessment of Law’s star power that whole night, because when he came out to present Best Actress over two hours later, he paused his scripted remarks to declare, “Forgive my compromised sense of humor, but to answer our host’s question about who Jude Law is, he’s one of our finest actors …”
Twenty years later, Law has settled comfortably into the post-matinee-idol phase of his career. This month, he’s promoting his roles as a grizzled FBI agent in The Order and a Force-powered ruffian in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. The enthusiasm and appreciation with which his performances are now met make the backlash of 20 years ago a faded memory. But it’s a curiosity worth examining, one that said as much about the state of movie stars in the mid-aughts as it did about Law’s career.
The mid-aughts’ optimistic calculus of Law’s star trajectory made perfect sense until that stretch in 2004: insanely handsome, charismatic actor with two Oscar nominations (for The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain) by the age of 32. Directors, studios, and entertainment media all took that ball and ran with it. Vanity Fair put Law on the cover of its “New Establishment” issue in October 2004 with a profile that centered Law’s sextet of upcoming films (as well as his recent divorce from longtime wife Sadie Frost, which had become tabloid fodder, as well as his new romantic entanglement with Sienna Miller). But even VF expressed some reservations about Law’s proposed ascendancy: “He can do period and modern, drama and comedy,” said profile author Krista Smith. “He has looks, intelligence, and passion. His talent is not in dispute. And yet doubts remain about whether Law really is a movie star, which Hollywood narrowly defines as someone whose name alone can ensure a $25 million-plus opening weekend. Is he too pretty to play the Tom Hanks Everyman? Does he lack the earthiness of a Russell Crowe?”
That undercurrent of concern and skepticism cropped up again and again in coverage of the Autumn of Law (my term, not theirs). Entertainment Weekly cited Law’s “potential overexposure” in its “Fall Movie Preview” issue. Law himself admitted to worrying in an interview with the Washington Post. “The cynic in me says … I spent two years making these. I chose them all because they were so different, with such different directors at the helm, different types of films in different genres. And now they’re being lumped together and compared, and some would be overlooked because people would just be, ‘Oh, [expletive-ing] Jude Law again.’”
As the Rock monologue proved, that was exactly the general reaction. Just two weeks after Alfie had opened to $6.2 million and a disappointing fifth place at the box office (behind Pixar behemoth The Incredibles, the second weeks of Ray and Saw, and the third week of The Grudge), EW was already running with headlines like “Why Jude Law Can’t Open a Major Movie.” The magazine floated theories like “maybe Americans just don’t like such a handsome Brit” and the old “he’s a character actor in a leading man’s body” chestnut. What went unsaid, because neither EW nor anyone could tell the future, was that Hollywood was entering a crisis era for movie stars. The “death of the movie star” has been chronicled again and again and again in recent years, pretty much every time Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Ryan Gosling, or any of the countless A-listers we assume can make audiences flock to theaters instead flop on opening weekend.
The number of actors guaranteed to open a movie to $25 million or more in its first weekend was vanishingly small back in 2004, and it’s even smaller now, with mostly the same names on that list: Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington — and even Cruise now comes with the “but only in Mission: Impossible or Top Gun movies” caveat. Unbeknownst to many, the age of IP had already crept up on Hollywood, and Law’s star status was one of the first things that it trampled. The No. 1 movie of 2004 would end up being Shrek 2. There wouldn’t be another non-sequel to top the yearly box office for five years (Avatar in 2009), and since then, only two non-franchise movies have done so (American Sniper in 2014 and Barbie in 2023). Hollywood had already stopped making new movie stars in the way we used to define them. We just hadn’t noticed it yet.
The “six-movie overkill” narrative assigned to Law was also a bit of a disingenuous stretch. Law’s role in The Aviator amounted to a brief cameo as Errol Flynn. Meanwhile, he was merely an unseen narrator in A Series of Unfortunate Events. You’d have to be operating on an incredibly low Jude Law fatigue threshold to have felt overwhelmed by the actor’s presence in either of those movies. And yet, unjustly, whenever Law’s 2004 output was cited for flopping — as Alfie and Sky Captain certainly did — he never got the benefit of The Aviator’s $102 million domestic total, nor A Series of Unfortunate Events’ $118 million.
Four movies in the span of three months is still a lot, of course. And each of the four films that Law actually starred in were their own unique flavor of underwhelming. I Heart Huckabees — certainly the best film of the four, creative and funny enough to have endured the rancid reputational freefall of its director, David O. Russell — was intellectually alienating and too self-consciously “indie” to many. Closer was a Mike Nichols movie starring Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, and Natalie Portman, but despite Owen and Portman earning Golden Globe awards and Oscar nominations, the film undershot its lofty Oscar expectations (and Law, playing a craven adulterer, was completely bypassed throughout the season).
Still, at least Closer and Huckabees were ensemble pictures. Sky Captain and Alfie were the two biggest failures of the bunch, and they both rested squarely on Law’s shoulders. He’d shepherded Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow — a throwback-in-style adventure romp set in a sci-fi future and filmed with real actors against fully CGI backgrounds — from its infancy and produced the film under his Riff Raff production banner. Neither critics nor audiences had the first idea what to do with this movie and its giant robots, warring dirigibles, washed-out color scheme, and digitally resurrected Laurence Olivier.
But they certainly knew what they thought of Charles Shyer’s remake of Alfie, starring Law in the title role made famous by Michael Caine: They didn’t like it. And after a marketing blitz that included a Mick Jagger original song, a smirk-forward trailer, and Law hosting an infamous episode of Saturday Night Live (yes, Law was the one apologizing for Ashlee Simpson after her lip-syncing snafu), Alfie was righteously trashed. Unfortunately, out of all six of Law’s 2004 movies, this was the one that was supposed to be the star vehicle, the movie Law would make a success on sheer force of movie-star charisma alone. As a referendum on his star power, Alfie’s critical and box-office failure could not have been more damaging. Looking back now, it’s the one Law clearly sees as a regret. “I think [it] was a bad move,” Law told GQ UK last month. “I just felt it hadn’t elevated [the material] and felt a little light, a little too cheesy.”
The rest of the aughts were a rocky road for Law, full of failed Oscar bait like All the Kings Men — sorry, Sean — and arthouse curiosities like Wong Kar Wai’s English-language debut, My Blueberry Nights. The one exception that’s stood the test of time, ironically, is The Holiday, directed by Nancy Meyers (the ex–Mrs. Charles Shyer). After that film, Law began to find footing with roles that proved that he actually was that “character actor in a leading man’s body” we hear so much about. As a cuckolded statesman in Anna Karenina, a snaggletoothed conspiracy-theorist podcaster (preposterous!) in Contagion, a disappointingly fallible James Bond type in Spy, a sleazy music manager in Vox Lux, a greed-poisoned capitalist in The Nest, Law brought out a kind of thwarted ambition. Over the years, he’s managed to make his advancing age and the accompanying fade of his youthful beauty work in his favor. The man turns a receding hairline into a character choice better than any actor in the business.
The answer to “Who is Jude Law?” has been definitively answered — not by a pissy Sean Penn but by Law’s delivery again and again of roles that Tom Cruise, all due respect, would never have touched over the past two decades. And he’s never released more than three movies in a year since.
