Jude Law's Best Movie Ever, According To Rotten Tomatoes
"I didn't feel like I really ever leaned into playing handsome," said Jude Law, speaking to DuJour in 2024. "[...] I was trying to play against my looks in my early 20s, and now that I'm saggy and balding, I wish I had played it up."
He's got a point. A survey of the English actor's roles after becoming a bigger name in the '90s reveals that he rarely played good-looking stand-up guys when he was younger. Not only that, but on those occasions where he did lean into his natural beauty, he would often play some kind of cad (like he did in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Alfie") or a character whose insecure, selfish behavior makes it difficult to appreciate his gorgeous features (like in "Closer" and "I Heart Huckabees"). "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" even went so far as to weaponize Law's looks by making them artificial and plastic-y as the robot sex worker Gigolo Joe.
Probably the closest a young Law came to being an old-school Hollywood hunk was in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," an idiosyncratic pulp sci-fi action-adventure pastiche that had anything but "populist blockbuster" written all over it.
In another life, it's easy to imagine Law might've downed martinis and broken hearts as James Bond. In fact, it's those precise qualities that writer/director Paul Feig successfully tapped into when he cast Law as CIA field agent Bradley Fine — a thinly-disguised riff on 007 — in his 2015 action-comedy "Spy." Limited as Law's screen time in the film may be, it's a noteworthy entry in his oeuvre for a variety of reasons — not least of which is that it's his highest-ranked film on Rotten Tomatoes with a critics' rating of 95 percent from 261 reviews (plus an average score of 7.2 out of 10).
Spy has Jude Law playing second banana to Melissa McCarthy
What if James Bond failed one of his missions and Moneypenny had to take his place? That's more or less the premise for "Spy," albeit with a comedic spin. The film stars Melissa McCarthy as Susan Cooper, a CIA agent who's more than capable working behind a desk but is forced out of her comfort zone after a high-stakes operation involving her field partner, Bradley Fine, goes south. Being a middle-aged single fat woman, however, Susan is not-so-subtly looked down upon and condescended to by many of her peers. Even Fine regards her as little more than his quirky sidekick; it never even crosses his mind to consider her as a potential romantic interest (much less that she might harbor feelings for him).
"Spy" is primarily a vehicle for McCarthy — that and a scene-stealing Jason Statham, whose turn here as the overly-confident tough guy agent Rick Ford proves that he should really be hired for more comedies — but Law's casting is essential to what makes the film tick. For all its broad humor and comical thrills, "Spy" is keenly observant of the ways society treats women as invisible and deems them undesirable and, thus, pitiable based on their age and particularly their weight (see the documentary "Your Fat Friend" for a much deeper dive into all the ways fatphobia affects our day-to-day lives). Fine isn't deliberately cruel or patronizing to Susan; he's just a conventionally attractive bloke who's clearly never bothered to examine the prejudices he's unknowingly absorbed. It's a role that very much plays to Law's previous experience and history on screen.
Honestly, much as Law might regret that he never fully "leaned into playing handsome" when he was younger, I'm glad he didn't. Give me an actor who makes interesting choices like he has over a bland leading man anyday.