Jake Gyllenhaal and I are sitting across from each other at the Hotel Casa del Mar in Santa Monica, California.
The waiter ushered us away from the brunch crowd to an isolated table in the corner, flush against the windows, looking out onto sand and sea. It’s a postcard out there – happy surfers, skaters and bladers – with the sun dancing on the waves.
Not here, though. Not so much.
Jake looks dishevelled, possibly tired, and at this point, maybe even a little disappointed. He came to talk. He likes to talk. But then I asked him a question about his upbringing, and now, he seems sceptical of what we’re attempting here, this whole “interview” business.
“One thing I learned a long time ago,” he says, “is if someone has a story they want to write, they’re going to write it, and there’s nothing I can do. Maybe I can get in four or five words in a row that are mine but…”
“Do you think that’s happening here?” I ask. “That I came with an agenda and there’s nothing you can do to change it?”
“Well, is it true?”
“No!”
“It could be like that. It has been.”
“Well, let’s at least try not to do that.”
“I would love that. Believe me.”
***
People who work with Gyllenhaal talk more than anything about his discipline, his commitment and his need to push the limits and try something new. This is what I’ve heard from four directors, two actors and a playwright. They use words like “serious”, “prepared” and “intense”. They remark on how “he really goes for it”. Apparently on set, Jake’s the one asking to do one more take and suggesting script changes to the director, even sometimes whole new scenes.
As his friend and two-time director Denis Villeneuve says, “It’s a challenge to work with Jake. But it’s a great challenge. He likes to push the material.”
Today, that material is this interview. Some people might approach an interview with a stranger behind a mask of politeness, making a conspicuous effort to be pleasant above all else. But Gyllenhaal’s not a fan of just being “nice” for “nice’s” sake. He’s never rude, but there’s a restlessness about him, you can see his brain ticking. He wants to talk, but not about nonsense and fluff. There was half a plan to just hang out and chill, maybe take a drive or walk along the beach. But he wasn’t into it. Driving around wouldn’t help me get to know him, and that’s why I was there, surely? No, he’d sooner just talk, somewhere we won’t be bothered, if that’s all right.
So, here we are, two men drinking bottled water in a deserted corner of a hotel restaurant. We’re effectively alone. All the other tables are empty, and there’s no waiter hovering with news of today’s specials. Neither of us even looks at a menu. It’s as stark as a Beckett play. And that’s how he likes it.
There’s plenty to talk about.
Now 34, Jake is five years into a remarkable run of movies, the equal of any actor of his generation. Not that he wasn’t a force before – with credits like Donnie Darko (2001), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Jarhead (2005) and Source Code (2011) – but there were blips, like The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010). He was in his twenties. “I took things because they were jobs,” he shrugs. “I mean people are paying you money, you’re 26, are you kidding?”
Then something tectonic took place. His priorities shifted and his perspective changed. “I woke up one day and I wasn’t in the right room,” he says. “It was like a David Byrne song: ‘That’s not my beautiful house. That’s not my beautiful wife.’”
So, he changed his life, the way men sometimes do around 30. He moved from his native Los Angeles to New York and pursued theatre. He chose smaller budget independent movies, with darker, more challenging themes. He calls it “a growing-up thing”. And now a new Gyllenhaal has emerged; still with the boyish features, the searching eyes and a wide smile, but he’s older now, more determined. His frown furrows have deepened. The blips are history: every film he makes now is worthy of your attention. There are no blockbusters, action-adventures or cute love stories, not anymore. He makes films for grown-ups. At a time when television is increasingly stealing the mantle from cinema in terms of sophisticated storytelling for adults, the Gyllenhaal brand is the antidote.
The change first began with End of Watch (2012), a heartbreaking story about two cops in southeast LA, an experience he says “redefined for me how I wanted to make movies.” Next came Enemy (2013), a haunting doppelgänger thriller about split identity and madness directed by Denis Villeneuve. Gyllenhaal so liked working with “De-nee”, as he pronounces his Christian name, that before Enemy was even in the can, he’d committed to his second film, Prisoners (2013), a bleak and gripping story of torture, child murder and obsession. Then, late last year, he produced and starred in Nightcrawler, a brilliant indictment of American society via the character of Louis Bloom, a sociopath and feral capitalist who rises from the grime of LA to set up his own late-night TV news service that aims to capture first-hand footage of crime scenes. How he dodged an Oscar nomination for that role is a mystery.
The run continues this year. He’s an actor on a roll.
***
Starting in reverse order, there’s Demolition this winter, a study in grief, alongside Chris Cooper and Naomi Watts (Gyllenhaal plays a Wall Streeter who responds unusually to his wife’s death). Before that, in October, Everest tells the epic true story of the 1996 climbing tragedy on which Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air was based (he plays Scott Fischer, the deceased lead guide).
But first, this July, is Southpaw, a traditional boxing movie. He plays the fictional fighter Billy Hope, who is on top, loses it all before fighting his way back, having been through an Eminem-soundtracked training montage. The coach (Forest Whitaker) is a wise old boozer. It ticks the boxes but underneath it is a story of shame, rage and redemption. Billy Hope’s anger earns him a fortune in the ring, until one day, outside of it, it costs him everything he cares about.
“He’s a guy that couldn’t deal with his own shame,” Gyllenhaal says. “The director Ed Zwick [Love & Other Drugs (2010)] told me this wonderful thing: ‘Everything you learn is through shame.’ It’s so true. There’s those moments where you face humiliation, they’re so freeing if you can get through them.”
“What have you learned through shame?” I ask him.
He smiles. “I’ve learned a lot. But specific examples? I don’t want to reveal all that.”
Gyllenhaal’s is a standout performance. As expected, he goes all out, on every front. His physique tells the story as he’s arguably the most chisel-ripped screen fighter in history. And he’s never less than convincing. Which is all the more impressive, given that Jake wasn’t even a fan of the sport before.
“I didn’t do a boxing movie to do a boxing movie, if you know what I mean,” he says.
“Let me tell you about his commitment,” says Southpaw director Antoine Fuqua, who actually does train as a boxer. “When he first came to me, I said, ‘Have you boxed?’ And he said, ‘Not really, just a bit of MMA [mixed martial arts] stuff for End of Watch.’ So, I sent him to see Terry Claybon, who trained Denzel [Washington] for The Hurricane. And when Jake threw a punch, Terry said, ‘Hell no! He can’t box!’ Now look at him. He can actually fight. That man trained like a beast.”
It was a punishing regime of two three-hour sessions a day, seven days a week for four months. Along the way, Fuqua would take him to gyms, to meet managers and promoters. “We saw the Pacquiao [v Bradley] fight, we trained at Mayweather’s gym in Vegas,” he says. “Jake gave up whatever life he had to live the life of a fighter. That’s a sacrifice. He even broke up with his girlfriend because he was at the ring every day!”
The shoot was no cakewalk, either. Jake was thrown into the ring on day one, where pros would pound him in the ribs and punch him on the jaw for the fight sequences, while a crowd of extras screamed at him from the ringside.
“I could tell he was hurting,” Fuqua says. “But we never used his stunt double. Jake did what a fighter would do, he went to the ropes and covered up. He was improvising fight sequences.”
The truth is, he loves this stuff. The gym, especially. Jake’s a cerebral type who loves to venture into abstraction and ideas, although today it’s partly a way to avoid talking about his personal life (he’s fiercely private). But he also describes himself as “very physical”. He loves to transform his body for a role, whatever that requires. Playing Billy Hope, he packed on the muscle, but for Nightcrawler, he dropped 30lbs. His character in the latter is a ghoulish, emaciated figure of the night, so he starved himself and ran 15 miles to the set every day. It left him paradoxically both irritable and delighted.
“Physicality is a way into the mental state of a character,” Gyllenhaal says. “I get off on knowing that my energy has shifted. My technical side is going, ‘Yeah, you’re a bit of a maniac, but you know how to keep it in check’. But it’s not like this huge deal. It’s that Louis CK thing, [about] when people say they’re ‘starving’. Maybe you should rethink that word? You had a meal four hours ago!”
One of the things he enjoys about physical transformation is that it takes discipline, perhaps his favourite word.
“Freedom is on the other side of discipline,” he says. “That’s my mantra. Nothing comes easy if you’re going to do it well.” And that doesn’t just go for the physical aspect, but the whole process of preparing for a role. He hurls himself into it. “It’s what I love most about my job.”
He discovered this on End of Watch, when he and co-star Michael Peña spent six months with LA cops and sheriffs, for a 22-day shoot. He’d never gone to such lengths before. They tagged along to crime scenes, they heard bullets shoot past their ears, they saw dead people.
“There were times, when I was taking cover, wearing a Kevlar vest and thinking, ‘Come on, we’re making a movie!’ You know?” he says. But at the same time, he loved it so much, it changed his life. “I have never felt so good about being in Los Angeles as when I was in East LA working with police officers. Just being in that culture, especially the Hispanic culture. It was amazing.”
To this day, one of his best friends is a former LA sheriff.
Ever since then, he has approached every movie in the same spirit of total immersion. “It connects you to what’s really happening,” he says. “As an actor, it’s easy to become disconnected from reality, but I can also spend five months in an environment that most people would never get access to. So, it’s actually a great way of engaging with the world. I’m not saying what I go through compares to what actual cops or boxers experience every day. There’s a hierarchy of importance, and actors are way down. I get that my job is absurd. I’m hyper-aware of how ridiculous it is. But at the same time, I take it extraordinarily seriously! Because as absurd as it is, it can also breed empathy.”
This is why he prepares so intensely, because for Gyllenhaal, empathy has a molecular, even mystical quality. “I believe deeply in the unconscious,” he says. “That you literally accumulate the molecules of the space that you’re in. We’re like 90 per cent water, so naturally we are going to be affected by the moon when it’s full: if the sea is, why wouldn’t we be? That seems scientific to me. So, if you spend enough time in whatever environment your character would exist in – the way I spent six months with police officers – then the molecules of that environment must transfer somehow. And then you put it on screen, and people go, ‘I feel something that I don’t normally feel.’”
What this amounts to on shoot day is an actor who is almost zealous in his commitment. He puts everything into every scene. On Nightcrawler, the script didn’t require him to smash a mirror in a rage, but he did it anyway, and cut his hand open. On Prisoners, he grabbed on to the back of Hugh Jackman’s truck as it pulled away and was dragged for a distance. That wasn’t written in, either. It wasn’t even in frame. In Enemy, there’s a scene where Gyllenhaal’s character is phoning his doppelgänger, someone who looks just like him, and he’s not sure whether it’s real or he’s losing his mind.
“We must have shot it 45 times,” Denis Villeneuve says. “I just kept the camera rolling and he was pacing around the room, doing it again and again like a mantra. He was trying to find something chaotic, to lose control. And afterwards, there was something so vulnerable in his eyes. His hands were shaking, he had gone so far away. For me, Jake is like a scuba diver: he goes deep, deep into the unconscious.”
This is partly Chris Cooper’s doing. When Gyllenhaal co-starred with him in October Sky in 1999, the young actor asked the veteran for advice. “I told him, have no regrets when you leave a scene,” Cooper says. “Don’t leave anything on the table. This is a very competitive business, and for most people it’s short-lived.”
