Will the Real Jake Gyllenhaal Please Stand Up?The 31-year-old A-lister, who stars in End of Watch, can be spotted all over town—on a date, riding his bike, feeding parking meters for strangers—and yet his essence is nowhere to be found. Is he the smiling guy next door seen in so many paparazzi shots, the dark philosopher who buries himself deeper in each successive role, or simply a wily, charismatic chameleon? Take your pick.
By Ivan Solotaroff
Photographs by Mark Seliger
September 2012 Issue, Details MagazineA dozen Jake Gyllenhaals pass by me outside En, the mobbed Japanese bistro where the actor has booked us a table. Some of these doubles are brainy types, a Gyllenhaal staple since Donnie Darko launched him to indie stardom at 20 and most recently seen in the existential sci-fi thriller Source Code. Others mimic the hyper-fit versions of Body by Jake: the ripped Marine of Jarhead, the ex-con of Brothers, the pharma rep who showed so much ass in Love and Other Drugs. There's even a Prince of Persia Gyllenhaal, of the anime abs and shaggy hair. Granted, this is New York City's trendy lower West Village, where the good-looking go to dine on Friday nights. And part of Gyllenhaal's appeal has always been his Everyman-ness. Still, the sheer number of replicants is surprising.
Or maybe it's just me. As Gyllenhaal's body of work grows, he only gets harder to peg. A-lister, art-house thespian, indie king—he's simultaneously all and none of the above, a distinction that's kept him just shy of Leo/Brad one-name status. That's likely to change after this month's End of Watch, in which Gyllenhaal gives a performance, as a South Central L.A. cop, unprecedented in its pure exposure of the man. I actually extend a hand to greet a passing six-footer with the exact buzz cut and MMA-esque physique Gyllenhaal has in the film, until the man's glare tells me this will not be our Brokeback Mountain moment. It's almost a letdown when the genuine Gyllenhaal hops out of a cab—scruffy-bearded, in a blue work shirt, off-brand sneakers, and drab tan chinos that nullify any shot at a memorable first impression.
I understand the beard is for the role—roles, actually—in the movie he's currently filming in Toronto, An Enemy, in which he plays a nerdy history professor obsessed with a vain actor who's his double. But as we order a degustation menu, I start by asking him where the muscle-bound cop of End of Watch has gone. Gyllenhaal has been spending more time in New York recently, and gossip columns had the lifelong fitness nut leading spinning classes at SoulCycle and riding his bike to and from meetings, but—
"I haven't cycled in a long time," he preempts. "Ask me where I run."
"Where do—"
"I don't run anymore. Do I take care of my body and take conditioning seriously? Yes. But exercising regularly doesn't fit the energy of the character I'm playing now."
A beer arrives for him, half of it vanishing in the time it takes me to get the tape recorder going, and as the first three of our ten delicate courses slowly arrive, Gyllenhaal's plates empty fast. A suspiciously large number of beautiful waitresses deliver the respective courses, glancing sideways at him as they linger over descriptions of each dish and continually align fresh sets of chopsticks. That's the only clue I'm sitting with a celebrity.
Gyllenhaal's essentially in character as we meet, though it will take me some time to understand that and what it means to him. Oblivious for now, I remind myself how long his day's been already: a full morning on-set in Toronto, then the flight back to New York, then a battery of meetings right up to our dinner. Tomorrow will be busier: auditioning aspirants for various parts in his American stage debut, If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet, which opens Off Broadway this month, then a late flight back to Toronto for a full Sunday of shooting An Enemy.
It's still not entirely clear to me if he's playing both main characters in the film: the professor and his doppelgänger, the actor. "No," he says, "it's a movie about me meeting myself, but another actor's playing me." He delivers the line with such sincerity, I miss the sarcasm for a second—long enough for the ice to break with Gyllenhaal. Sarcasm normally induces discomfort and introduces distance, especially between people newly met. With Gyllenhaal it somehow does the opposite—he brings you in on the joke, puts you at ease. Is it because he's really that genuine and positive? Whatever the quality is, it's of increasing value to him.
"My whole life," he says, "I'd come to a scene and just ask for something real. I'd say, 'Please, just tell me what's going on. All the research, how your character picks up a fork, it'll all come when we know the truth.'" He's talking about a personal and professional evolution that accelerated during the months of his preproduction involvement in 2011's Source Code. The story—a soldier is enabled by technology to relive eight crucial minutes, over and over, until he gets it right and saves the world—resonated deeply with him. "Now the time's come to turn that on myself"—searching, over and over, for the truth—"and it's 'Game on.'"
End of Watch is the apotheosis of Gyllenhaal's quest—102 minutes of blood-soaked, adrenaline-producing drama propelled by the bond between his Officer Taylor and Taylor's partner, played by Michael C. Pena. The effortlessness of Gyllenhaal's acting has been obvious since Donnie Darko, but nothing is easy about Officer Taylor—or the film.
"I'd envisioned his cop as a locked-down, even-keel guy," says End of Watch's director, David Ayer, who grew up around those cops in South Central. "And as the director, I'm supposed to be the one with the world map. Actors just see the road they're on. But as the shooting progressed, there were so many unexpected things he was giving—it's unbelievable." Gyllenhaal attributes some of that experimentation to the extreme preparation necessary for the film. "Five months, for a 22-day shoot," he recalls. "Three nights a week in ride-alongs with cops. Fight training every morning at a Kenbo Karate dojo, and I got the shit kicked out of me. Then the shooting range, shooting past each other's heads, with live ammo. There's a simulated fire in the movie, but Dave wanted us to feel what that's like, so he had us do a controlled burn."
"What's that?"
"That's a Saturday where me and Michael Pena drive down to Orange County, dress like firemen head-to-toe, and suddenly we're there just sitting in the middle of a burning building."
Cast and crew understood the commitment required for the film, no one more than Gyllenhaal. "Dave told me right off that this was going to affect my soul," he says. "'Friends are going to say, That's the Jake I've always known, but somewhere deep inside, you'll know otherwise.'"
The waiter who brings our fried-chicken main event has served Gyllenhaal before. A good-looking and extremely fit kid, he's apparently had trouble linking the bearded nerd before him to the sex symbol the waitstaff is buzzing about downstairs. He says he's seen one of Gyllenhaal's films. "No, I recognize you. I get it now," he says, but he still seems dubious. "And I still really don't know who you are, either," Gyllenhaal says, smiling. "But it's nice to see you again."
The conversation bleeds into Gyllenhaal's on-set friendships that have endured: At his 31st-birthday party, half the guests were friends of 20 years, the other half LAPD officers he'd recently met. According to Ayer, they were the ones Gyllenhaal talked to all night. "I realized these are some of the best actors I've worked with," Gyllenhaal says. "I do a scene a day, maybe. They do 15 scenes every day—their word for it, crime scene—with much higher stakes."
His mien raises the question of where Gyllenhaal draws the line now: between the personal and the professional, between risk-taking and recklessness, between a challenging next project and a fanciful one.
"Every journey starts with fear," he says. "And I could say that's what I want to embrace now. A real experience. Connection with the people I'm working with, so I'm helping them make something. And I want, overall, to trust what I know is right. There have been many times when I haven't. If that's what you asked, it's what I'm asking myself now: Where is the line? What is the line? There's so much context, it can be almost impossible to find. It comes down to finding the beating heart of a story—what's this really about?—then remaining true to instinct in telling that story." He looks straight at me—no, through me. "And I just had a déj vu," he says, tearing into his fried chicken.
I mention the physiological link between déj vu and the exhaustion Gyllenhaal must be feeling, the brain's ability to process—
"No, this had happened," he corrects me, then his volume drops precipitously, "and now it's happened again."
That "moment relived" was at the heart of Gyllenhaal's attraction to Source Code and its eight recurring minutes. It's a microcosm of his life in front of the camera, with take after take offering chances to finally get it right. Gyllenhaal is a storyteller who just happens to work as an actor. He was a child of the industry but not a typical child actor. His father, the director Stephen Gyllenhaal, and his mother, the screenwriter-producer-director Naomi Foner, wanted a normal childhood for him. He first appeared on the big screen at 11 as Billy Crystal's son in City Slickers but couldn't take parts that interfered with his schooling (L.A.'s Harvard-Westlake and then Columbia, where he studied Buddhism and English literature) or his after-school jobs (as a lifeguard and a busboy, sometimes both). Hollywood trappings abounded—Paul Newman taught him to drive a race car, and a young Steven Soderbergh rented the family's garage apartment—but they mostly added up to what he calls "fluency in the filmmaking language."
He got the acting bug from his sister. "Maggie was always performing, and in so many ways. Then I got to watch Martha Plimpton and River Phoenix with Sidney Lumet, rehearsing Running on Empty," says Gyllenhaal, whose mother wrote the Golden Globe-winning screenplay. "I was 7, and had no idea who these people were. But I knew I was witnessing something magical."
That magic was the discovery of what it takes to tell a story. Gyllenhaal (who named his production company Nine Stories, after the J.D. Salinger collection) says that's his true love. "What success really gives you is the freedom to fail and then try again," he says. That's been a trademark throughout his career, for better and/or worse: Gyllenhaal rarely does takes the same way twice, once prompting his Jarhead director, Sam Mendes, to say, "He can be a bit of a pain in the ass. If he gets a bee in his bonnet, he won't let it go…trying too hard with being absolutely brilliant. He's also the least technical actor I know. He's not an actor who's designed to hit marks."
Gyllenhaal's way of keeping it fresh can befuddle costars on occasion. The far more common result, however, becomes clear in watching his catalog. For over a decade, actors have been doing some of their best work opposite him—Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Aniston, Tobey Maguire, Heath Ledger. "It's no accident. Jake takes it all very seriously but also has a very light touch," explains Anne Hathaway, his costar in Love and Other Drugs and Brokeback Mountain. "On Brokeback, my final scene was on the phone with Heath, who was in Venice for Casanova. Jake offered to read Heath's lines. On the last take, he changed the line, ever so slightly. That kicked off something in me, and lo and behold, that's the take in the film."
"I grew up on the other side of the camera," Gyllenhaal says. "And yes, I do love making movies as much as being in them. I love actors, watching what they do, and I do love acting off-camera, and how it helps tell the story. But the camera eventually does turn to you, and then it's a very different question. I don't know if I have the answer to it yet.
"I guess you'll see up in Toronto," he says. "It's me acting against myself."
• • •
"No rehearsal, we just shoot," Denis Villeneuve, the 44-year-old Canadian director of An Enemy, yells across the set, a sprawling former glassworks that's become Toronto's main film studio. Villeneuve and a continuity girl study the monitor in front of us. The shot consists of nothing but Gyllenhaal pacing the living room of a modest apartment. By now, I shouldn't be surprised: He's wearing the dull tan chinos from our dinner.
This morning's scene is simple but pivotal: Adam, the professor, enters his apartment, rushes to his phone for messages, finds none, says "Shit," then hears a knock on the front door he's just entered.
Adam's "double," Anthony, the vain bad-boy actor, is on the other side, and their interaction—to be shot after lunch—will be a crux of the film. Adam meeting Anthony. Jake meeting Jake. Gyllenhaal's impulse is to play it big, trying out various interpretations of Adam's unease as he goes to answer the door. For the next take, Villeneuve asks him to try going smaller, and Gyllenhaal dials it back. This doesn't quite do it, either.
Villeneuve is keeping the cameras rolling, even between takes. "When you let it roll," he says, joining me at the monitor, "the actor can sometimes take you to a space you hadn't thought of. Jake is amazing in those spaces."
Gyllenhaal has positioned himself in front of the camera, giving himself an extreme close-up before the third and final take, his bearded face filling the monitor with one expression of suffering after another. Almost instinctively, his hand rises to cover his mouth in horror. As D.H. Lawrence said, "a young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes."
Ayers has seen it before, in End of Watch. "That's Jake," he says. "He's a genuinely sweet guy, but he's also got this real darkness, this rage he's running from. All the great actors have it, believe me. It's what you do with it."
As the camera rolls, I see exactly what Gyllenhaal does with it: take after take, each one a manifestation of the horror he's unearthed.
Until he nails it—not with horror but with old-fashioned anxiety. Villeneuve and Gyllenhaal quickly agree it's the best expression. The decision is key, since it will be the take that Gyllenhaal, as Anthony, will be acting against when his two opposing selves meet.
After readying himself to inhabit the part of the vain actor, Gyllenhaal heads off to shoot publicity stills in a nearby room. Flashes go off, and then an imposingly handsome man in a leather jacket and motorcycle boots barrels out with that broad-shouldered, get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way gait such men move with. It takes a second to register it's Gyllenhaal, as Anthony.
Back on-set it is hard to say what's so different about him. Something—everything—seems changed. "Beard's the same," Villeneuve says. "The only difference is that Anthony's hair is higher, and Jake pats it down so it's not so obvious. It's all him—the 'special effect' here is Jake."
"I'm fucking crazy?" says Gyllenhaal as Anthony, walking threateningly toward "Adam," a chest-high foam pad, which he'll grab, jab, or bitch-poke in the chest. "I'm fucking crazy?!" This is still rehearsal, but Gyllenhaal's menace as Anthony is already being calibrated.
A production assistant tells me my ride to the airport is waiting. As I gather my things, a scream comes—"I'm fucking CRAZY?!!"—followed by a thwack of the pad so hard it literally shakes the set, on which quiet suddenly reigns.
As I leave, I see Villeneuve talking to someone at the top of a gangway. Both men slump against the wall, immersed in thought. I start to thank Villeneuve for his hospitality, when the man next to him wishes me a safe flight. Of course, it's Gyllenhaal. He's still in Anthony's clothes, but, deep in reflection, he no longer has that actorly swagger or the violence that was just on display. As I bid him good-bye, I have the strangest feeling I don't have a clue who I'm saying it to.
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