Jude Law Once Felt 'Frustrated' That Media Attention Was Placed on His Looks Instead of His Acting Career

Jude Law looks back on the early 2000s with some level of discontent.

While speaking with Variety in a feature interview published Wednesday, Oct. 30, Law, 51, spoke candidly about his experience as a tabloid fixture and male sex symbol during that time; as the outlet noted, the actor was named PEOPLE's Sexiest Man Alive in 2004 and experienced talk show hosts like Ellen DeGeneres discussing his lips during promotional appearances. 

“Interestingly, I was talking about this to a friend. He made a good point. He said, ‘If you were a woman, people would have been told off for objectifying you,' " Law said. "I think it frustrated me because I was this young guy desperately keen to have an acting career and for people to talk about that, as opposed to what I looked like.”

Law broke out in Hollywood with his performance in 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley and he faced significant media attention in the following years due to his high-profile 2003 divorce from his first wife Sadie Frost and subsequent relationship with Sienna Miller. The actor recalled to Variety that "being invaded was something that always made me bristle."

“That time is now over, and I’ve moved on from it. And so has, fortunately, the attention of the photographers and the prying eyes on me," he said elsewhere in the interview. "But I’ve had to learn to live in a certain way that keeps them at bay. And I have to handle my kids’ and my partner’s privacy in the same way.”

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Law has been married to wife Phillipa Coan, an English psychologist, since 2019; they were first linked romantically in 2015. The couple share two children, though they have not publicly shared either child's name.

The actor has seven children in total: he also shares son Rafferty, 28, daughter Iris, 24, and son Rudy, 22, with his first wife Frost. He and Samantha Burke share one daughter, Sophia, 15, and the actor also welcomed daughter Ada, 9, with Catherine Harding in 2015 before he began dating Coan. 

Law has multiple upcoming projects, including the new movie The Order, in which he portrays an FBI agent investigating white supremacist groups, Ron Howard's next movie Eden and the upcoming Disney+ Star Wars series Skeleton Crew.