Jude Law beefs up to play a blue-collar mariner in Black Sea. Jude has really got the look of a wealthy, privileged playboy like a few times in his career.
Image Credit: Alex Bailey/Focus Features
Jude Law is a handsome man. He’s got the look of a wealthy, privileged playboy and has been cast as such more than a few times in his career. So when The Last King of Scotland director Kevin Macdonald started looking for a blue-collar guy to take on the lead role in his submarine thriller Black Sea, it’s easy to understand why he was hesitant to even consider the golden boy.
“I wanted somebody in their middle age and who was British and who could convincingly be a blue-collar guy,” Macdonald told EW. “If you look around Hollywood, there aren’t very many who look like that and certainly not stars. I went to see him thinking well Jude Law is great, but he’s not really him.
But Law isn’t afraid of making an unglamorous transformation, whether he’s sporting rotting teeth for Contagion, yellowed fingernails for Road to Perdition, or an exaggerated receding hairline for Anna Karenina quickly convinced Macdonald that he could play the role of an embittered and unemployed former Navy man. Law adopted an Aberdeen accent, put on weight, built up his forearms and shoulders, shaved his head and let the stubble grow out and suddenly, he wasn’t the lithe Dickie Greenleaf anymore. He was a man you could imagine gathering a group of hardened Russian and British seamen for a trip to disputed waters, in search of treasure that might be sitting at the bottom of the Black Sea in a World War II era U-boat.