Jake's progress
by martyn palmer
With three new films, including a brave portrayal of forbidden love in the Wild West, Jake Gyllenhaal should have nothing to cry about (but that doesn’t stop him)
Jake Gyllenhaal sometimes likes to speculate about what he might do in the future. He flirts with the idea of becoming a gardener, opening a restaurant, or better still, making furniture, just like the 10ft-long mahogany table he crafted for his mother recently, which now takes pride of place in the kitchen at the family’s holiday home in Martha’s Vineyard. "Nothing makes me happier than knowing that my mum and dad sit down at that table every night when they’re there," he says. "I just rang my dad and asked him to give it another coat of linseed oil. It gives me a tremendous amount of joy to do things like that."
The irony is, of course, that while most young men of Gyllenhaal’s age fantasise about being a movie star, here’s a movie star who daydreams about being a carpenter. "I’m in a funny profession. I’m just 24 years old, and I should be able to question what I want to do with my life," he says, rather defensively. "Right now, I’m doing what I always wanted to do, but that might change and maybe I’ll end up doing something else if it makes me feel better."
In truth, of course, Gyllenhaal’s future is mapped out more clearly than a giant atlas. Acting may indeed be a funny profession, and he may have doubts about it, but he’s good at it, that’s for sure – quite possibly the best of his generation. We’re meeting at dusk in a hotel garden at the height of the Venice Film Festival. It’s been a day of heat (temperatures in the 80s) and hype – Gyllenhaal’s face is everywhere on posters for Brokeback Mountain, which has been given a rapturous reception by public and critics alike. He’s run the gauntlet of press conferences and jousted with the junketeers, international film journalists, all after their pound of flesh. Now, as the sun sets, it’s swarming mosquitoes that turn up for his blood instead.
He swats distractedly at tanned arms made muscular from the rigours of training for his role in Jarhead, Sam Mendes’s surreal film about the first Gulf War. But as we’re here to talk about Brokeback Mountain, it’s love, in all its forms, not war, engaging us – the love for a parent, a sibling, a girlfriend, and the love between two men.
Gyllenhaal’s emotions are close to the surface, flickering across that handsome, open face like pages turning on a book. It’s an essential asset for an actor, the ability to draw upon such feelings, and he laughs and even cries easily. He comes from a close, loving family, and at one point, I ask if his parents’ enduring marriage is an inspiration to him, which leads to a reflection on the nature of lasting relationships. "I recognise that if you love somebody you should stay with them, but that doesn’t mean it was that way with them always. My dad said that was what he liked so much about Brokeback, that it was a story of how complicated it is to love someone over a long period of time, what a struggle it can be. It was their 25th anniversary party and some guy asked my dad what it was like to be with the same woman for so long, and my dad said, ‘She’s not the same woman.’"
He pauses here, welling up, and turns his head away to dab at his eyes. "I’m sorry, it’s so weird that makes me cry. I think it’s because I’m a little tired."
His point is that relationships change and evolve and go through tough times, but you have to stick with them. Having a little weep obviously runs in the family. Gyllenhaal arranged a special screening of Brokeback for his parents recently, and by the end of it they were in a heap, like a collapsed scrum. "They were both in tears," he says, looking decidedly glum again, before immediately brightening up. "Hey, maybe they were crying out of embarrassment."
Gyllenhaal first heard about the screenplay of E. Annie Proulx’s short story several years ago. "It was introduced to me the same way as it was introduced to everybody else – as the gay cowboy story. I was 17 and I was terrified of it at that time. It sounded like the farthest thing from anything I’d want to have anything to do with. I didn’t even read it."
Gyllenhaal’s reaction wasn’t unique. There were plenty of A-list stars who read the script, appreciated that it’s a beautifully written piece, and promptly turned it down, presumably because playing gay for hetero stars was considered too risky. Why was he so scared? "I just didn’t think I’d be able to do it. And I was too young."
A few years later, an older, bolder Gyllenhaal heard that Oscar-winner Ang Lee was going to direct it. "I read it and it was beautiful, just beautiful. I knew that I wanted to do it. I didn’t even think about the intimate scenes or who I would be doing it with, I just wanted to do it. It was just the idea of these two people struggling to love each other, and that really moved me."
Brokeback Mountain is a classic American love story where the lovers happen to be men, and quite how that will play in the US multiplexes we’ve yet to see. But for the critics on both sides of the Atlantic, it is undoubtedly one of the best films of the year. It won the main prize in Venice and should receive a hatful of Oscar nominations, including one for Gyllenhaal, who could also be in contention for his role as a young soldier in Jarhead. In fact, it’s hard to avoid Gyllenhaal right now – he also pops up as a maths student in John Madden’s screen version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play, Proof, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins.
It’s to be hoped that Gyllenhaal doesn’t really quit while he’s ahead. "No, I guess not," he says. "I love it." And the camera loves him. Take a look at any of the films mentioned above – or his breakout performance in the excellent Donnie Darko – and you’ll see a gifted big-screen actor coming of age before our eyes.
Set to the epic backdrop of the West, Brokeback Mountain is a sweeping story of longing and regret, of forbidden love and desire, and thoroughly deserves the plaudits it has received. Gyllenhaal plays Jack Twist, a young drifter who meets another ranch hand, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), when they are hired to protect thousands of sheep that graze on Wyoming’s majestic Brokeback Mountain through the summer, before they’re driven down into town for winter shearing. As the pair swap life stories and talk of their hopes for the future – marrying, raising a family and buying land – they are drawn together, first as friends, and eventually as lovers, which, initially, is a shock to them both. Over the years, they continue to meet for a few snatched, stolen days, and Twist is the one who urges that they should set up a home together. But it’s Del Mar who backs away, frightened of the backlash such a move might provoke in such a deeply conservative land.
That same conservative land – or huge swaths of it – might just find Brokeback Mountain a little too unconventional. "People can respond however they want to," says Gyllenhaal. "You can look at it as an issue of sexuality, but it’s really about how hard it is when you fall in love with somebody, whether you’re gay or straight."
Gyllenhaal admits that both he and Ledger were anxious about filming the love scenes. "It was nerve-racking. But, you know, you take a deep breath and dive in the water, and it’s freezing cold and you want to get the hell out. You know what I mean? And then they want you to do it again. But ultimately, we both knew we had to trust Ang. And we also knew we’d do whatever was needed, because the story is really beautiful and the consummation of that relationship was completely valid. If you don’t see that stuff, the story doesn’t have the same poignancy."
Two good-looking straight actors playing such roles was bound to generate plenty of nudge-nudge publicity, and Gyllenhaal’s already tiring of it. "Hopefully, people will see beyond the whole ‘Oh, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal have love scenes’ thing."
Gyllenhaal grew up in the film community – his father Stephen is a director (of Waterland among many others) and his mother, Naomi Foner, is a screenwriter. His sister Maggie, older by some two years, is also an actress. He spent much of his childhood visiting one film set or another and mixing with actors and directors and writers – Jamie Lee Curtis is his godmother – and made his first film appearance in City Slickers, aged just ten. It’s no wonder that by the time he was in his early teens, he was already set on acting. "We grew up around a lot of famous artists, but at the time they were just friends. Then I woke up one morning and it was like, ‘Whoa! Look who’s here!’"
Growing up in LA’s artistic community made it easier for him to play a gay man, he believes, than it was for Ledger, who comes from a rural Australian background. "We went to cowboy boot camp to prepare for the film," says Gyllenhaal. "Heath didn’t need to do that. I’m unable to put a saddle on without falling on my ****, and he’s galloping off into the sunset. I was surprised when Heath said he would do the film. I think he was hesitant about it. But the idea of a same-sex relationship is hardly foreign to me. I mean, I grew up in LA."
In fact, Gyllenhaal long ago asked questions about his own sexuality. "I’ve grown up among a lot of people who have different sexual preferences. And I definitely don’t think you’ve grown up until you’ve thought about those things. It’s not necessarily about experimenting with those things, but thinking about them. You meet someone who is hiding their sexuality and you question it yourself. That happened a long time before I did this movie. Making this film didn’t make me question it. It made me want to tell a story of the love I’ve had in my life. That’s what I really thought about. There was a time when I was going through a really hard time in my life, breaking up with a girlfriend, and it just resonated with me in so many ways, and actually, it helped."
He frets that his private life is becoming a soap opera for the tabloids, especially in the States where his on-off relationship with the actress Kirsten Dunst is meat and drink to the celeb mags, and paparazzi follow their every move, providing long-lens "evidence" of every tiff.
"It’s crazy," he agrees. "They choose to photograph young couples like us, and young couples are precarious. So there’s going to be drama; I mean, you’re in your mid-twenties, and that’s how it’s going to be. If they photographed two 45-year-olds who’ve been married for 15 years, they’re not going to get much drama."
Gyllenhaal is still young – he’ll be 25 on December 19 – and wants the freedom to make mistakes, just like everybody else, without a long lens there to snap it. "I should be doing what I want to do and screwing up and that should be OK. Learning things."
He’s at turns affronted by the intrusion, and then pragmatic. "It’s the life I chose, and I knew that was how it was. I know people deal with worse things in their life."
In Jarhead, based on Anthony Swofford’s best-selling memoir of his time in the marines during the first Gulf conflict, Gyllenhaal got to act alongside Peter Sarsgaard, who happens to be his sister’s boyfriend. The shoot was intense – a cast made up entirely of men, and a crew almost all male, stuck in the Californian desert making a movie about soldiers waiting in the Saudi desert to go to war.
With testosterone running riot, there was plenty of aggression spilling over. At one point, Gyllenhaal was knocked in the mouth with a rifle butt and lost half a front tooth. He refused to speak to the actor responsible until Mendes wrote an extra scene in which his character, Swoff, apologises to the other man.
His relationship with Sarsgaard, who plays a hard-*** marine called Troy, was difficult. "I considered that it was him trying out for my sister’s hand," says Gyllenhaal, deadpan. "I’m not saying whether he succeeded, but that’s what it was. I think Maggie revelled in it – I think she was excited for both of us. And you know, we came out of it closer, that’s for sure. There’s that saying that to be somebody’s friend you have to recognise they are an equal mind. I think he left that experience feeling that about me, and I know I did about him."
His relationship with his sister is intense and, he says, often fractious and painful. "It’s been hard at times. I remember one of the first movies she did, which will go un-named, and when I watched it, I said to her, ‘I can’t tell you any other way, but you were really bad.’ And she started crying, she was so hurt. And then, with Secretary, it was just like, ‘You were extraordinary!’ And she was. But she knows I’m honest, and she knows that I love her."
His family provide the best refuge, the safest haven. "I found where my heart really lies and what makes me feel good is being with my friends and my family; growing with them, sharing with them and being intimate with them – that’s what makes me happiest."
For a moment I’m expecting more tears, but Gyllenhaal is contemplating carpentry again. "Maybe I’ll make some chairs next," he muses. "To go with the table." He’ll be making plenty more films, too. Despite flirting with alternatives to acting, he’s a natural. You might even say that he was born into it.
Brokeback Mountain is released on January 6, Jarhead is released on January 13, and Proof is released on February 10
(okay I really wanted a real excuse for this emote 
but hey the republicans DO have Ricky Shroeder of Silver Spoons fame 
But dear Jake takes the cake. hehe. Jake takes the cake. 
