Jude Law's best movie roles, ranked (2024)

Harry Potter. The Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sherlock Holmes. Jude Law really has done it all, and his filmography has something for everyone, from low-key indie gems beloved by the Letterboxd generation through to Oscar movies and collabs with some of the world’s finest auteurs.

He has played an unhinged pandemic conspiracist (Contagion). The worst partner in the world (Closer). Hell, he’s even taken on Henry VIII (Firebrand). Later this year, we’ll see him in Prime Video’s fiery thriller The Order, in which he plays a Middle American FBI agent hot in pursuit of a white supremacist.

But when a guy has made as many films as he has — across a three-decade career, no less — where do you even start? Here, GQ has assembled our ranking of our favourite Law performances, from The Talented Mr. Ripley to Closer, Firebrand and Enemy at the Gates.

10) Contagion (2011)

Law appears in everyone’s favourite COVID-era hatewatch as the conspiracy theorist Alan Krumwiede, who fools his loyal online fanbase into believing that he has found a cure for Contagion’s killer virus. He’s 4chan, he’s the alt-right commentators you see on YouTube, he’s InfoWars — all self-interest, all grift. It’s a dark part that was timely enough in 2011, but feels all the more relevant in the years after the pandemic.

9) Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Now. Did Benedict Cumbercatch and Martin Freeman play the definitive on-screen Holmes-Watson duo in the BBC TV series? Yes. But was that the fault of Mr Law? Certainly not. Cumberbatch is the superior and superlative Holmes – that’s hard to argue. But Law’s Watson is more than a match for Freeman’s, and there’s plenty else to like here besides. It’s a slightly more Pirates of the Caribbean-style take on the source material, and if you think that actually sounds like a lot of fun, then you’re right, because it absolutely is.

8) Enemy at the Gates (2011)

Question the historical accuracy of Enemy at the Gates, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s blockbuster war movie about the Soviet Union’s last stand against the Nazi blitzkrieg, all you like — what isn’t debatable is just how fun and explosive it is, if gritty and macabre. Law plays Vasily Zaitsev, a heroic young sniper who crawls through the muck, blood and wreckage of Stalingrad on the hunt of a rival rifleman, Ed Harris’ Major König.

7) Hugo (2011)

Possibly Scorsese's least-Scorsese film sees Law playing the late father of sweet little Asa Butterfield, who lives in the walls of a railway station and is trying to find the key he needs to get his father’s automaton (a sort of robot man thing) working. It’s a bit Tim Burton, a bit Series of Unfortunate Events, but mostly it’s just quite lovely. Law explaining the complexities of various bits of machinery exudes the sort of calm wisdom you wish your dad could’ve exuded when you were building that chair from Ikea. Perfect casting.

6) Vox Lux (2018)

This year, director Brady Corbet is probably en route to an Oscar or two for his new American epic The Brutalist. His last movie, Vox Lux, centres on Natalie Portman as traumatised pop singer Celeste — but Law, playing her manager with whom she has a weird, somewhat sexual relationship, makes for one hell of a feature. He is controlling; he has the most to gain from Celeste’s enduring success; he is also a source of comfort, and perhaps the one person who truly understands her. A complex, skin-crawling performance.

5) The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Wes Anderson’s best film (oh, come on) is drowning in top-tier acting talent, and Law’s role alongside them is a big block of cement to his place among the best in the game. Here, that talent is deployed as a rather (it feels almost unnecessary to say, given the director) eclectic range of characters, who coalesce around the titular post-beautiful hotel and death of one of its favourite guests, whose bequeathing of a extremely valuable painting to bellboy/lover Ralph Fiennes raises eyebrows among her more distinguished accomplices. They of course accuse Fiennes of murder, a chase ensues. It’s about as bonkers as it sounds and it has every right to be –it’s fantastic.

4) The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Jude Law playing someone that someone else would want to be so badly he tries to become him just makes a whole lot of sense. In Talented Mr Ripley, that someone is Dickie Greenleaf, a wealthy Princeton graduate who seems to spend most of his time sunbathing in France. His family in the US want him to come home and snap out of it, so they hire talented impersonator Mr Ripley (Matt Damon) to pretend to be an old college friend and retrieve their son from his permaholiday. When Ripley arrives in Europe and sees the life Greenleaf is living, he sort of gets the appeal, and things grow intriguingly, wonderfully complicated from there.

3) Firebrand (2023)

Law reportedly donned a special perfume that stank of rotting flesh to play Henry VIII in Karim Aïnouz’s Firebrand, a nod to an open wound that went unaddressed for the Tudor king’s last decade IRL. He disappears within the hulking monarch, all while cleverly avoiding caricature. It’s a gross performance — his version of Henry cannot keep his hands to himself, poking and prodding at the orifices aplenty — and one that feels impressively distinct from anything Law had done before.

2) The Nest (2020)

Criminally underseen when it came out in August 2021 — though Coronavirus had much to do with that — Law plays an ambitious trader, Rory O’Hara, in The Nest who moves his family to a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of London after he finds a new job in the capital. He is a volatile man, envious of the monied people in his orbit; the film is an eerie, tragic meditation on social mobility and insecurity about your own place in life. He projects himself as the image of wealth, but when it comes to pass that it’s a mirage, and his bank account is empty, it falls to his wife (Carrie Coon) to pick up the pieces.

1) Closer (2004)

Mike Nichols’ classic relationship drama centres on four of the worst people you’ll ever meet who cheat on each other endlessly and, frankly, hate themselves. Law plays Dan, a writer who pursues Alice (Natalie Portman) but soon finds himself wanting a go with Anna (Julia Roberts) — he’s probably the worst of the bunch. At its best, Closer reaches for a deeper truth about adult relationships that we all privately acknowledge but try to ignore, for our own sanity: that every couple is hanging together by a thread.