Jude Law’s illness led to The Order inspiration

Jude Law found the key to his ‘The Order’ character when he was “sniffling and coughing and haggard”.

The 51-year-old actor stars in the movie as FBI agent Terry Husk, who is hunting down neo-Nazi bank rubber Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), and he relished the chance to “let [himself] go” to play the “broken” detective.

He recently told Britain’s HELLO! Magazine: “I was adding to the DNA of the guy and, physically, I was waiting for a click.

“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, ‘OK, this is him. This is the guy!’

“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.

“I just let myself go because I was working at home on this project and I got more and more hairy and unkempt.”

The movie is based on a true story but Jude’s character is an amalgam of multiple real people, so Jude studied photos of various FBI agents from the 1980s to hone his character’s look.

He said: “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.”

The ‘Talented Mr. Ripley’ actor’s production company Riff Raff Entertainment co-produced ‘The Order’ and he was “amazed” no one had picked up the story before.

He said: “I was amazed that no one had done it before and it seemed like a very timely story for unfortunate reasons. It just felt like, ‘If not now, then when?’

“I hope people come away with a better understanding of how and why people behave like this.

“History is littered with these kinds of people. It’s not just an American problem, it’s a global problem. Hopefully one day we can pull it out, roots and all.”