MOSLEY: It’s, yeah, your 2023 film where you played King Henry VIII. I read that you hired a perfumer.
LAW: I work with her quite often, actually.
MOSLEY: Really? Yes.
LAW: Yeah. First of all, she’s an absolute genius, Azzi. And she runs an amazing perfumery called The Perfumer’s Story. She makes incredible scents. And, you know, scents is a really quick way to accumulate sort of feelings and emotions. You know, if you walk into your grandma’s house, it smells a certain way, and you feel a certain way. If you go out and someone’s been cutting the grass – (sniffing) right? – it evokes all sorts of memories. Or the smell of gasoline, you know?
MOSLEY: Yeah.
LAW: I mean, things like that that are very pungent are very quick to make you feel and think, you know? And my job is an odd job. You know, whether you want to or not, you turn up. You put on someone else’s clothes, and you have to embody someone pretty damn quick. And sometimes it’s like, hey, it’s 7. The sun’s coming up. We’ve got to go do this.
MOSLEY: We got to get this done.
LAW: Get in it, right?
MOSLEY: But let’s talk about what she did for you, OK? She…
LAW: So she built this. She made a perfume for me. And I’d read this piece about Henry. He basically had these ulcers on his leg that were rotting, and it was a miracle he lived the 10 years he did with them. But you could smell him, apparently, three rooms away. He’d stank, like, fetid.
MOSLEY: Yes.
LAW: And what I realized, I’m playing him at the very end of his life when eventually he died of these things from a fever. And I just thought it would be very helpful to everyone else and to me if I stank. So she made me this incredible, noxious odor that I kind of sprayed on myself.
MOSLEY: It was made, a concoction of pig sweat.
LAW: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Fecal matter.
LAW: (Laughter) You’re going, does this say this?
MOSLEY: To mimic the smell of decaying fish.
LAW: Yeah.
MOSLEY: So it was really bad.
LAW: It was really, really, really, really rancid. Yeah. But it really helped. To me, it was very interesting playing someone who is incredibly powerful, all-dominant, expects everyone to bow to their every need and thought and want, and yet is sitting in a body that is immobile because of the weight he’s put on and because of the wounds he has, kind of in his own rotting flesh, and having to kind of face himself. And he can’t escape what he’s done to himself and who he’s become. You know, he’s a mass murderer.
MOSLEY: Yes.
LAW: And deluded to the extreme of believing that he’s second only to God. Well, he’s about to face God. And it’s like, OK, what’s going on? What’s going on in that man?
MOSLEY: You’re pretty unrecognizable in that role. And I’m just wondering, there had to be some pretty interesting conversations around the rank smell on that set. It helped you. It also helped your colleagues, your costars.
LAW: Well, I mean, it wasn’t like I, you know, wanted to shock them or warn them, you know, but we discussed it. And Alicia Vikander, who plays my wife, the queen, Queen Katherine Parr, was very game for it because she sort of loved this idea that she had to have this intimacy and this devotion amidst this sort of wall of stink, (laughter) you know? And the guys who play my Privy Council were old friends of mine from the theater. And again, it was this sort of – this conflict between observing their devotion and putting up with this appalling physical decay.
