(July 8th, 2002)
[Jude comes on the screen, looking fairly relaxed, resting his chin on his hand. He's still sporting his beard, and wearing a cream colored blazer, with a white V-neck shirt underneath, blue jeans, and white Italian shoes]
KC: Jude Law, good morning! So nice to see you.
Jude: [nods his head and adjusts himself in his seat] Good morning. It's nice to be back.
KC: Your character is sort of one seed--[stutters on the word 'seedy' and corrects herself; Jude chuckles] seedy, disgusting guy, isn't he? Tell us about him.
JL: He was a lot of fun to play.
KC: I bet he was!
JL: It was, uh... I was quite surprised really when, uh, I read the script and couldn't quite work out which character Sam had uh... intended for me, and was really actually quite thrilled that it was Maguire, because um, it meant... it, it meant [stutters for a moment] it meant that it was going to require a lot of... [whispers "I don't know, a lot of..." under his breath] a lot of playing on my own, a lot of kind of... a new look that we wanted to work out that made this guy obviously threatening, but equally able to kind of disappear into the background and be seemingly unthreatening. And obviously the opportunity to work with some fantastic actors.
JL: Well the idea was this guy's um... kind of rodent-like, and he can hunt people down. No matter what little evidence he has, or uh, trails he has to go on. So we wanted to give him this sort of rat-like look. And we played with the teeth, the fingernails, and then the hairline, uh... which I'm already losing anyway [Katie and Jude laugh], but they kind of extend it way back.
KC: And they made you sort of have you losing your hair--
JL: Yeah, all back here. [strokes the back of his head where Maguire's hair was thinning]
KC: And I read that they cut your hair individually; I mean... individual hairs, with like fingernail scissors! Is that right?
JL: They spent... I think it was 10 hours I had to sit. And um, the hairdresser had microscopic glasses on so that she could see kind of the follicles and clip the hair individually and that way it wasn't just sort of a baldpate, but that it kind of had... weasley strands [does a motion with his hand as if he were stroking these "weasely strands" and laughs] left that stick to my head [still chuckiling]. Yeah...
KC: You're our first person to talk about Road to Perdition on the show.
JL: Oh! Great.
KC: So you should probably describe what the movie is all about.
JL: Yeah... it's a very--it's quite a broad film. And as much as the backdrop of the piece is very much the recognizable kind of thirties gangster movie set in New York--[realizes he meant to say Chicago and covers his face with his hand and shakes his head] eh, Chicago! Set in Chicago, which at the time was being run by, uh... Al Capone. But this concentrates more outside of Chicago with the Irish mobsters and very quickly develops really into a road movie and a film about a relationship between a father and a son. A father who doesn't know his son at all well, and soon he has his son only to rely on as a partner both in crime and also as a family member. (CONT.)
