Jude Law Was Told to 'Get a Suntan and Find Your Swagger' as Prep for His “Talented Mr. Ripley” Role

Jude Law is opening up about how he nailed his breakthrough performance as dreamy millionaire playboy Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

The star sat down on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show with Julia Cunningham to dish on the 1999 thriller, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Noting that the actor oozed sex appeal in the role, Cunningham brought up the scene in which Matt Damon’s titular conman first encounters Dickie lounging on an Italian beach next to his fiancée, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow).

“I imagine, like, being on the beach, the notes were like, ‘Matt Damon, look more pale. Jude, look hotter and more sun bronze,’ ” Cunningham joked.

“Those were exactly the directions we were given,” Law, 51, responded.

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

“I was directed to go to that island weeks before and get a suntan and learn to sail and drink fine wine,” he added.

As Law noted, he’d mostly appeared in smaller roles and under-the-radar films prior to his head-turning performance in Ripley. One of the challenges he faced on set, he said, was playing Dickie’s easy confidence opposite his acclaimed costars.

“You know, I knew Matt's work already. I knew Gwyneth and Cate [Blanchett] and Philip [Seymour Hoffman].” he explained. “And I turned up. I'd only really made a couple of films and honestly, the biggest challenge to me was to kind of embody the kind of confidence and swagger of Dickie. And, you know, I was pretty overwhelmed being in that film to begin with, so a big part of the buildup was, yeah, get a suntan and find your swagger.”

“A lot of that is to do with not caring what people think,” he continued. “What I mean by that is, you know, those kind of people, those kind of characters, their antennae is not sort of, ‘Oh, are you comfortable?’ It's like, ‘I own this place and you are just passing through my world.’ ”

Related: Jude Law Just Ruined the Magic of His Classic 2006 Movie with Cameron Diaz, The Holiday: 'Sorry!'

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Law, of course, more than rose to the occasion, and Ripley catapulted him to Hollywood’s A-list.

“It was just a wonderful period of my life,” Law told PEOPLE earlier this year of the time following the film’s release. “It felt like everything I'd hoped acting and that career could provide was happening.”

“I was working with a wonderful director, a really exciting young cast,” he added of his work on Ripley with Anthony Minghella. “I was playing a guy who was just playing jazz and boating around and swimming in the ocean and eating delicious food in wonderful locations.”

The response the film got, he said, “was life-changing. Really.”

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