What is Jude Law’s must-have for playing ‘scary’ Captain Hook?

LOS ANGELES – Peter Pan & Wendy, a successor to Disney’s 1953 animated feature Peter Pan, offers a darker and more realistic take on the classic children’s tale.

Premiering on Disney+ on Friday, the fantasy adventure depicts Captain Hook – the arch-enemy of Peter, an ageless magical boy who can fly – as a legitimately menacing villain instead of a cartoonish one.

It also imagines a more complex history between the two, says English actor Jude Law, who plays the one-handed pirate in the new film.

“We got to mine their backstory a little more and understand their past – a past where they were possibly once friends.

“And there’s a great physical rivalry and sort of gamesmanship,” says the 50-year-old star, who appeared in the Fantastic Beasts films (2018 to 2022) and superhero movie Captain Marvel (2019).

Alexander Molony, the English 15-year-old making his acting debut as Peter, says “audiences will recognise that rivalry that people have known for so many years – it’s just so much more fleshed out”.

But he promises there will still be epic fights between Peter and Hook, along with “the same sort of cat-and-mouse game and in-jokes that they have”.

 

The actors were speaking at a fan convention in Anaheim, California, along with the rest of the cast, including Ever Anderson – the daughter of American actress Milla Jovovich and English film-maker Paul W.S. Anderson – as Peter’s companion Wendy Darling and Yara Shahidi as Tinker Bell the fairy.

Written and directed by American film-maker David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon, 2016; The Green Knight, 2021), the movie – based on J.M. Barrie’s 1904 London play Peter Pan and 1911 novel Peter and Wendy – will reveal more facets to Hook, who in stage productions is often a pantomime baddie.

“It was particularly nice to finally layer in that understanding of who (he is) and why Captain Hook is so iconic,” says Law.

He wanted this version of Hook to be properly scary. “It was something I wanted to bring out of him.”

Even though Law did not want him to be “the subject of children’s nightmares, if you go back to the book, they talk about him being the only pirate that Long John Silver was scared of”.

“And I think it’s important,” he adds. “A part of childhood is the nightmares and fears we all have, and Hook, like a lot of the villains in Disney, embodies that.”

Peter Pan & Wendy also dug into Barrie’s Peter Pan play and novel for inspiration, he reveals.

“It was a journey of going back to the original material and looking. There are some beautiful illustrations of these characters that you can go back to, and take little parts that you love and that you want to embellish.

“There’s beautiful detail to this version where you get to look back and understand a little bit of why he’s there and why he behaves the way he does,” he says.

Law also threw himself into physically becoming the character, right down to the smallest feature of Hook’s costumes. “We were so finicky about getting each little detail and the colour right,” he says.

But he cared about one thing above all when it came to his appearance in the film.

 

“If I played Hook, it had to be my own moustache. Because I didn’t want to stick this thing on. It just would not have felt authentic,” says Law, who is married to English psychologist Philippa Coan, 35, and has seven children, aged two months to 26 years old, from this and three previous relationships.

“And I was very lucky in that just before I played Hook, I had a huge beard, so I had this enormous moustache that I got to wax every day and which I became obsessed with. That was an important part.”

As he watched fans react to the first footage of the film shown at the convention, he says: “It really hit me, the import behind this much beloved character. Hopefully, I’ve done him justice.”