JUDE LAW: TAKING ON A 'BROKEN' F.B.I. AGENT IN NEW THRILLER

REVEALS HOW TAKING THE REINS AS A PRODUCER HAS PUT HIM IN CONTROL OF A NEW CHAPTER IN HIS CAREER

- GILL PRINGLE

Having launched his career more than three how he found inspiration by looking at photos of almost unrecognisable as a repulsive Henry VIII 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.