Do we like Jude Law?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Clean on harm, a good-egg record on peace and climate causes, and one old personal stain plus one shrugging comment on a shelved film.
Jude Law was born in London in 1972, the son of two teachers, and started on stage young, with the National Youth Music Theatre at 14. A West End debut followed, then The Talented Mr. Ripley, which won him a BAFTA and an Oscar nomination, and Cold Mountain brought a second. He went from golden-boy heartthrob to a bloke happy to play flawed characters, Dr Watson and a young Dumbledore included.
His biggest public stoush was with the tabloids, and he was the wronged party. In 2012 News International lawyers admitted the company's guilt and apologised in court, and Law got about US$200,000 plus costs. He said his phone had been hacked repeatedly between 2003 and 2006 and that “No aspect of my private life was safe from News of the World.” That's a person who took on a media giant and said so in public.
His own low point was in 2005, when he reportedly had an affair with his nanny while engaged to Sienna Miller. He apologised publicly, saying he was “deeply ashamed and upset” about his behaviour. It's a personal betrayal rather than anything that hurt the public, and the record since then is quiet on that front.
On the harm test, we found nothing anti-LGBTQ+, anti-woman, anti-migrant or anti-science from him. In 2018 he said Dumbledore's sexuality doesn't define him and that the character is “multifaceted”. The one smudge: asked about Woody Allen's shelved film, which Allen's daughter has accused him of assaulting her over (he denies it), Law said he'd love to see it and called the accusations “a private affair”. Some will read that as a shrug and not an endorsement; it is the sort of thing that will bother some readers.
Recent work points the right way. He played Vladimir Putin in Olivier Assayas' The Wizard of the Kremlin, which the director frames as a warning about authoritarianism. In 2024 he joined other actors backing a Global Witness campaign calling for fossil fuel companies to answer for their actions. That's a decent run of choices, and no sign of him working with the culture-war crowd.
The good stuff is long-running. He has been an ambassador for Peace One Day, and in 2007 he was in Kabul alongside its founder launching a countdown to Peace Day in Afghanistan. He told the press conference there that “I think the message of peace is for everyone.” He has kept doing it for years, which is the part that counts.