Why has no one reported Jude Law and his ‘poo perfume’ to HR? Colleagues should be seen and not smelt

What’s acrid, sweaty, and smells like a rotting whale? It’s not last night’s kebab or your running trainers after a long jog in the rain, it’s Jude Law, the heartthrob once described as “the Sexiest Man Alive” by People magazine who, as he and his colleagues have testified, stinks. By his own admission, the man reeks. He stings the nostrils. He smells like a fatberg left out in the sun. He must, you imagine, be a nightmare to share a lift with. Which, presumably, is just the way he likes it.

What has happened is that some months ago the lovely, gorgeous Jude signed up to play an elderly, grotesque Henry VIII in the period flick Firebrand — and promptly clamped the bit between his armpits.

“I read … that you could smell Henry three rooms away … I thought it would have a great impact if I smelt awful,” Law told anyone who would come close enough to listen at a press conference in Cannes, noting that the venerable Tudor’s leg was rotting and his personal hygiene had hit the skids by the later stages of his life. So, for reasons that don’t strike me as wholly obvious, Law had a custom homebrew “poo perfume” whipped up by a specialist perfumier, which smelt of an “extraordinary variety of blood, fecal matter and sweat”.

Is this normal for actors? I can’t imagine a more hostile working environment. It’s certainly the kind of thing that a run-of-the-mill office HR department would surely wrinkle its nose at. Colleagues should be seen and not smelt. Shia LeBoeuf, infamously, upset castmates on the set of the World War drama Fury by going full method: ripping out his tooth and then “refusing to shower for weeks on end so he could better understand how his characters would have felt living in the trenches”.

When is it okay to stick your nose into somebody else’s business – and why is the answer “as soon as your nostrils are involved”? It is the great office offence, as much an eau pas as a faux pas. Certainly Jude Law has crossed a line by bringing his “poo perfume” to work.

We have all wrestled with the existential conundrum (what precisely are the rules here?) of a colleague, who shall remain nameless, wedging their whiffy gym kit under the desk after a lunchtime workout, or slipping their shoes off in the sweltering office or unboxing their stinky sandwiches al desko, clearing the room. Or sat next to someone unwrapping a juicy Big Mac on the train home.

A friend once secured a dream internship for a certain former chancellor of the exchequer, who shall also remain nameless, but who was so demonstrably underserved by their chosen deodorant that the friend, stuck in that tiny Westminster office, threw ambition to the wind and cut the work experience short. All that power, concentrated chiefly in the armpit glands.

How hard is it to remedy this, really? The British Medical Journal sensibly notes that “poor personal hygiene or body odour is a sign of an underlying problem, be it personal or medical”, and that any entreaty to HR may be met by a counterclaim that the employer’s actions relate to a protected characteristic — for example, disability or religion — and are therefore discriminatory.

Perhaps we shouldn’t remedy it all. Are we simply more intolerant nostril-twitchers today? In the long history of body odor, we assume that to be without smell is to hit the happy medium. But early Christians rejected bathing for its connection to the sin of pride or vanity.

Soft soaps were brought in during the early Middle Ages, and these were made from a mixture of mutton fat, wood ash and flower oils. The first patent for deoderant didn’t emerge until 1888, and the elite were hardly ahead of the great unwashed. King Louis XIV of France, who it is believed only took two baths in his entire life, was described by one Russian ambassador as “stinking like a wild animal”.

What’s clear is that Jude Law has woken up every day for several months and chosen a spritz of olfactory violence. But he may have the last laugh. Awards aplenty. Gongs galore. Perhaps it’s a smart way to ward off the paparrazi, too. I note that he received an eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes. Certainly the critics of Firebrand sound equal parts squeamish and smitten. There’s a brief shot of maggots writhing in Henry VIII’s leg “which could easily cause you to throw up,” relishes The Daily Telegraph. “A gasp-inducing shot of Henry’s enormous rolling buttocks suggests that Law has partaken in some alarmingly detrimental weight gain,” squeals The Times.

But agents take note: I won’t work with pungent superstars. Hollywood’s loss, I suppose.