Jude Law Rejects the Method Acting Label: ‘I Have My Own Method, I Think Every Actor Does’

Jude Law stars in back-to-back films at the Toronto International Film Festival this year with “Eden,” making its world premiere at TIFF, and the North American premiere of “The Order.” The film follows Jude Law as demon-addled Idaho FBI agent Terry Husk, tasked in 1983 with taking down an Aryan brotherhood led by Nicholas Hoult’s Bob Mathews.

To prepare for the role, Law took on some Method acting and admitted that he followed Hoult around for a day to get into character. However, Law rejected the label of “Method acting.”

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“I have my own method,” he told IndieWire. “I think every actor does. And that includes all sorts of weird, different things. It depends on what the director wants and depends on what the character demands and what things interest me.”

Law and his producing partner Ben Jackson, under their banner Riff Raff, produced the film. “It came to us as a script and the source material was an inspiration. And as the writer of the book himself said to us just last week, he’s glad that what Zach [Baylin] found was the essence,” Law said.

“In a way, filmmaking is always about boiling things down, reduction, simplification, but also specificity,” Law continued. “So from the script, came a brilliant director who we knew was going to really bed the piece in, add a humanit,y and draw out all these other layers. And I like to think he also did that through the cast.”

Ryan Lattanzio wrote in his Venice review that Law’s character “is a man who wakes up with a gushing noseblood but shrugs it off as just part of the morning routine.”

Law also took a moment to reflect on “My Blueberry Nights,” currently, Wong Kar-wai’s second to last feature from 2007. “With most films, you have a script, you have a map,” Law said of Kar-wai’s method as a filmmaker. “And with his, it’s an idea. There is no map. So you discover every day what the film is. You let the film sort of tell you what it is just through the work, the ideas you have in the moment, so it’s forever growing.”

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