The conversation: Jake Gyllenhaal
His role as a sensitive cowboy in Brokeback Mountain melted hearts, so why is he hamming it up now?
Chris Ayres
Jake Gyllenhaal is either going to throw a punch or burst into tears. That much seems certain from the way the 29-year-old actor is looking at me: eyes gleaming, chin lowered, his implausibly overpumped muscles almost ripping apart the seams of his army-green T-shirt. Suddenly I recall what he told me at the beginning of our meeting: “I did learn a bit of action on the set of this movie, so you’d better be careful...”
It was a joke. Or so I thought.
The topic that has brought my interview with the Prince of Persia star to a grinding standstill is that of his late friend, Heath Ledger — whose daughter, Matilda Rose, is Gyllenhaal’s goddaughter. Initially the actor seems happy to discuss their work together in the Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain — which featured several cowboy-on-cowboy love scenes — and he describes the filming in the summer of 2004 as “a magical time . . . I’d never witnessed the power of a movie in that way”. But when I ask how he remembers his Australian co-star, who died two years ago from a prescription drug overdose, his entire body appears to turn stiff, and a long, deeply uncomfortable silence ensues.
“Uh ... yeah,” he manages, eventually.
More silence. For a moment I fear that the actor might simply get up from where he’s sitting, under a bay window on the ground floor of a Santa Monica hotel (he wanted the sun to be directly on his face), and walk out. After all, Gyllenhaal is more sensitive than usual to press intrusion these days, largely thanks to the US tabloid frenzy over his break-up with Reese Witherspoon, the divorced star of Legally Blonde.
But Gyllenhaal isn’t angry, I soon realise. He’s choked — to the point where his eyes are glassing over. “That role,” he says, of Brokeback, “and the fate of all the characters and souls who were involved in the making of that project ... it’s just . . .” He trails off. “I don’t have much to say. Apart from the fact that that film moved many, many people.”
I suggest we move on to the next question, and Gyllenhaal nods. Within a few seconds the awkwardness is over, the actor has snapped back to his default charm, and we return to the topic at hand: his unlikely new blockbuster, based on a video game and produced by Mr AntiSensitive himself, Jerry Bruckheimer — known for such delicate Hollywood fare as, well, Bad Boys II.
Prince of Persia — with the British director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) — could hardly be farther removed from Brokeback, which was adapted from a story in The New Yorker about two rugged men who fall in love while cattle ranching in Wyoming. Indeed, just the thought of Gyllenhaal, who makes no secret of his left-wing politics, working with Bruckheimer, who supported George W. Bush and helped to turn fluorescentyellow Hummers into a status symbol, is enough to make many people splutter.
When I mention this to Gyllenhaal, he laughs. “Jerry’s more sensitive than he comes across, and I’m tougher than I seem,” he says. “And when you have respect for someone in a creative sense, it’s wonderful, regardless of your political points of view — which have never come up, by the way.” Nevertheless, he admits: “I’m definitely not the obvious choice to play this role, which is the reason why I wanted to play it. I’ve pretty much approached everything I’ve done in my career that way.”
The role is that of Prince Dastan, a fantastical Persian hero who must retrieve an ancient dagger to save the world. Those who are used to seeing Gyllenhaal carry himself on screen with an air of Salingeresque detachment — think of Donnie Darko (2001) or The Good Girl (2002) — will be in for a big shock when they see Prince of Persia. The actor has traded his inner Holden Caulfield for his inner Conan the Barbarian, right down to the codpiece and the ludicrous man-wig.
“It all started with the idea that the movie was going to be based on a sense of reality,” he explains, with a straight face. “That’s what separates this film from other video- game adaptations: the idea that it could be plausibly done in reality. That’s why David Belle [the inventor of parkour, also called freerunning] was hired to come in and to advise and choreograph a lot of the sequences. And when you learn parkour, that’s how the muscles become the muscles. Obviously I also did a lot of cardiovascular work, and there were the semi-daily runs from the set in Morocco to the hotel. At the end of every day I’d put on my running shoes and go for a run. When you’re in the middle of the desert it’s pretty extraordinary.”
Another first for this new bikini-waxed, protein-shake-gulping incarnation of Gyllenhaal: a “British” accent. “I had to learn it,” he says. “In fact, I had been intimidated by other roles where I would have had to do a British accent. Some I’ve stayed away from, to be honest, out of respect — I know that culturally it differentiates people in so many ways. As an American, you really can’t tell. I worked with Barbara Berkery [who coached Gwyneth Paltrow for Sliding Doors and Renée Zellweger for Bridget Jones’s Diary], I listened to tapes, but there was no one specific that I worked on. I wish I could say it was Mick Jagger, but in this case ... no.”
Overall, it’s a convincing effort: imagine a kind of Mockneyish Prince Harry. “That was the accent that worked the best, in terms of delivery, wryness, of the comedy in the script,” Gyllenhaal explains, after claiming not to have heard the phrase Mockney. “I tried to steer it a little south, but my dialect coach wouldn’t let me. I just always felt it added a little bit of flair.”
He had lots of time to practise. Three months were spent filming on location and another three working at Pinewood. “I never broke the accent, even when I was on set, because I knew I’d get that cringe factor from the Brits — even though I know the British can be very polite — overly polite, in my opinion. But I really love that, too.”
The Heath Ledger moment notwithstanding, Gyllenhaal makes for charming and playful — if slightly precocious — company. He is not, however, the kind of actor who makes headlines when he opens his mouth: he’s way too practised for that. Instead he offers feedback on the quality of my questions (“it’s the way they’re presented that’s important”) and dodges awkward topics with deadpan humour (“I have no comment about whether a movie is good or not when I’m talking to a journalist”). All this he does while looking in obscenely good health — although, for all his natural athleticism, you still get the feeling that he’d rather be at home, writing poetry, than, say, playing football.
If there’s something almost antiseptically professional about Gyllenhaal, it’s almost certainly because of his upbringing, which seems to have given him an immunity to the many delusions of Hollywood stardom. Born in Los Angeles, the son of the Hollywood director Stephen Gyllenhaal and the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Naomi Foner, he’s been a showbusiness insider since the age of 10, when he made his cinema debut in City Slickers. Meanwhile, his uncle on his father’s side is executive editor of The Miami Herald, and his godmother is Jamie Lee Curtis. Even his older sister, Maggie, 32, is an A-lister in her own right, and is married to the Dead Man Walking actor Peter Sarsgaard.
“I grew up in a family of storytellers,” Gyllenhaal says. “I had parents whose lives were saved and changed by watching movies. That was always the emphasis in my house — what an extraordinary medium movies can be.”
The hyper-achievement of the Gyllenhaal family isn’t a recent phenomenon. In fact, it goes all the way back to the Swedish nobility. “I’ve gotten scolded many times by my family for having heard the origins of my name, saying it publicly, and then getting, ‘That is not what our last name means!’ ” the actor laughs. “But according to one story, one of my great-grandfathers was a cataloguer of beetles and butterflies, and the King of Sweden collected all of his papers, and supposedly gave him a room off the Golden Hall in Stockholm where he could work. So our last name is Gyllenhaal. That could be total shite, though, to be honest.”
While others might have struggled with acne or social embarrassment as teenagers, Gyllenhaal’s primary frustration was not being able to appear in Hollywood blockbusters for which he had successfully auditioned. “I remember being very upset, because I would audition, and my parents would say, ‘OK, we’ll let him do that, but then at some point I got a role, a big role [in The Mighty Ducks, a Disney franchise from 1992] ]and they were like, ‘No, no, no’. In hindsight, it was a blessing. A child needs an upbringing, I firmly believe that. And if you’re going to do something, anything, and you are gonna do it well, there has to be resistance. But at the time, it was horrible.”
It’s perhaps because of this resistance that Gyllenhaal isn’t as arrogant as he might otherwise have been. He seems genuinely worried about his film accent, for example, and frets about pleasing the video-game fanatics who will no doubt offer brutally honest opinions about the actor’s turn as their virtual hero. “It’s quite a culture, and I think it’s intimidating in terms of a movie,” he says. “But then again, I’ve played characters who existed in real life, who’ve been to war, worked for the CIA, and, in that sense, it’s interesting that I feel as much pressure to satisfy the gaming world as I would a US Marine.”
Speaking of which: how did America’s Devil Dogs react to Gyllenhaal’s portrayal of a Gulf War antihero in Jarhead? “Definitely a mixed reaction,” he responds, with a quick smile. “Some people really loved it, and ... well, what I appreciate is the flat-out honesty I get from people who were in the service. They come up to me and say, ‘Hey, are you the guy from Jarhead?’ I go, ‘Yeah’. And they go, ‘I didn’t like that movie’.”
He bursts out laughing.
And what about Brokeback Mountain? What does the general public think of that? Thankfully, with the mood lightened, Gyllenhaal seems comfortable returning to the subject of the Oscar-winning movie with one of the most tragic postscripts in modern cinema history. “There was a beauty to that film,” he says, with feeling, “regardless of the jokes poked at it. There was a beauty to it that surpassed all that other stuff.”
Prince of Persia opens nationally on Friday
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