Advertisement

Jude Law: 'You have to work hard to get my new play'

“Connection”: Jude Law with Obsession co-star Halina Reijn: Dave Benett
“Connection”: Jude Law with Obsession co-star Halina Reijn: Dave Benett

Jude Law has warned audiences they will “have to work a little harder” to understand his new play — and says a meeting with J K Rowling is next on his agenda.

The actor, who will play Dumbledore opposite Johnny Depp in the next Fantastic Beasts film, spun off from the Harry Potter series, is on stage at the Barbican in Obsession, playing a drifter caught up in a passionate love affair.

Avant-garde director Ivo van Hove’s play is based on a 1943 Italian film, which was in turn inspired by James M Cain’s noir novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Law said audiences would not be “spoon-fed” the story of how his character descends into a murderous obsession with Halina Reijn’s Hanna.

He said the “very quick, very extreme character changes” could leave theatregoers “trying to work out why you’ve gone from meeting someone to into bed with that person into killing that person’s husband into running away”. He said: “It means you come along and you’re treated with respect and you’re asked to work a little harder than usual and you usually leave with a greater sense of reward.”

​Reijn said the play is “more performance art than theatre” and would not have worked without her “connection” with Law. She said: “He is very free on stage, very physical, he doesn’t have a lot of boundaries. Ivo needs actors that are insanely talented in a technical way but also really give themselves.”

Law, 44, said he was in rehearsals for Obsession when he heard he had got the part of a younger Dumbledore and had missed the debate over whether the future Hogwarts headmaster would be seen in a romance with Depp’s character, the wizard Gellert Grindelwald.

He told BBC London: “My first port of call I hope is to meet J K Rowling and to talk exactly about that and who he is and who she wants him to be and learn a little bit more about her vision of this great man as a young man.”