Jude Law found the key to his The Order character when he was 'haggard'

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.”