Jude Law reveals physical change he made for new film

Having launched his career more than three decades ago with a series of increasingly significant roles, Jude Law recently found himself looking to start a new chapter.

Now 51, he tells how he was tired of waiting for good parts to drop into his lap, instead deciding to take control and plot his own course.

And if that meant taking on character roles rather than relying on his good looks, so much the better.

For his latest role in thriller The Order, he concealed his usual charisma in exchange for looking sick and burnt out.

Based on a true story, the film follows Jude's FBI agent Terry Husk as he hunts down Nicholas Hoult's malevolent neo-Nazi Bob Mathews, who left police baffled after a series of daylight bank robberies throughout the Pacific north-west in the 1980s.

Since Agent Husk is an amalgam of real-life FBI agents rather than a single person, Jude had to work out how to portray him.

"I was adding to the DNA of the guy and, physically, I was waiting for a click," he says.

"That came about because I got sick and I was very run down and tired. Our director Justin Kurzel saw something in me one day when I was sniffling and coughing and haggard. He was like: 'Okay, this is him. This is the guy!'

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"I just wanted him to feel broken. I wanted you to worry that he wasn't actually going to make it; that there was a sense of doubt."

Refusing to stop there, Jude even chose to add an unattractive nose-bleeding condition to his character, not to mention a hideous moustache.

"I just let myself go, because I was working at home on this project, and I got more and more hairy and unkempt," recalls the star, talking about how he found inspiration by looking at photos of FBI agents from the 1980s.

"They all had a big old moustache, so it seemed apparent that the beard had to come off and the 'tache had to stay. The challenge, of course, was that it couldn't be a kind of suggestive moustache.

"Those guys had the hair right up here – a real Ned Flanders moustache," he jokes, pointing up his nostrils in reference to the moustachioed character on The Simpsons.

Talking from Los Angeles, he has returned to his usual chic self, wearing an elegant dress jacket and silk neck scarf over a scoop-necked T-shirt.

Previously married to former actress Sadie Frost, with whom he has three adult children,

Jude subsequently dated American model Samantha Burke and singer-songwriter Catherine Harding, having a child with each of them.

He has now been married for five years to behavioural psychologist Phillipa Coan, with whom he has two young children.

And although Jude launched his own production company almost two decades ago, co-producing hits such as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Sir Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth, he has really got behind the endeavour in recent times, with Riff Raff Entertainment now serving as a co-producer on The Order.

"It's a new, exciting chapter," he says. "I've always had a curiosity about developing stuff and finding ideas – not just for myself, but putting people together, whether it's writers and directors or actors' ideas.

"My company's taken a leap forward in the past couple of years," continues the actor, who was almost unrecognisable as a repulsive Henry VIII opposite Alicia Vikander's Catherine Parr in last year's historical thriller Firebrand.

"Honestly, it feels for the first time that I've got hold of the reins of my career. As an actor, you spend so much time waiting for someone else to think you're right to do something, and there's a lack of control," says Jude, whose memorable roles include parts in The Talented Mr Ripley, Road to Perdition, Cold Mountain and The Holiday.

"What's wonderful with the company is that I feel as though I can get things moving. I also find stuff like The Order that I think should be made, needs to be seen and needs to be heard."

To read the full exclusive interview, pick up the latest issue of HELLO! on sale in the UK on Monday. You can subscribe to HELLO! to get the magazine delivered free to your door every week or purchase the digital edition online via our Apple or Google apps.