During a joint television interview promoting Spider-Man: far from home, Tom Holland – who plays Spider-Man – and Jake Gyllenhaal – who played the current villain – were asked in the fall of 2021 which director they would want to work with and Gyllenhaal responded: “Pedro Almodóvar.” That was one of the last appearances of the auteur film actor Gyllenhaal, because in recent years his priorities have been muscular films where his strong physique can be shown off, as confirmed Road House, the new version of By profession: tough, which has swept its premiere on Prime Video, a film with no plot other than a flimsy plot to pack fights. It is the latest development of an actor who has classics like Donnie Darko, Brokeback Mountain, Okja either Nightcrawler… and which in recent times has preferred to be directed by such testosterone-driven filmmakers as Michael Bay, Antoine Fuqua or Guy Ritchie. Why have your tastes changed? Or have you always had that passion for biceps and swords?
The success of road House on the Amazon platform has been of such caliber (at the beginning of April, after its first two weekends, they announced that 50 million viewers had seen it, although without specifying how they did the calculation; at the end of May They claim that they have reached 80 million and, according to updated data from the Nielsen consulting firm, it is the most viewed film in 2024 on the platform), that the actor’s production company, Nine Stories, has signed a three-year agreement with Amazon MGM Studios, a contract that specifies that the studio will have a first option on the fiction films that Nine Stories intends to produce both for theaters and for streaming. And that he came to road House after the initial development of its script by MGM (later, the major of Hollywood, and all its content, was swallowed by the sales platform on-line).
Your previous jobThe pact, by Guy Ritchie, had also been released under the umbrella of Amazon MGM Studios, although it had previously been in theaters. And with Nine Stories, Gyllenhaal had already produced for another platform, Netflix, Guilty (2021), by Antoine Fuqua, although in this thriller, remake from a Danish hit, the protagonist is a police officer who doesn’t move from the phone. The actor knows how to play in the new cinematographic playing fields: his next premiere will be, on June 12, the series Presumed innocent, on AppleTV+, in which he plays a Chicago prosecutor accused of a brutal murder. Does it sound familiar? Yes, it is the serial version of the Alan J. Pakula film that starred Harrison Ford in 1990. Zero creativity. Other remake further.
The curious thing is that Jacob Benjamin Gyllenhaal (Los Angeles, 43 years old) comes from a family founded on auteur cinema, son of director Stephen Gyllenhaal (The Land of Water, A Dangerous Woman) and screenwriter Naomi Foner (A place nowhere). Her older sister, Maggie Gyllenhaal, after making a name for herself as an actress, is now a prestigious director. (The dark daughter). Jack began his career at age 11, as the son of Billy Crystal in City cowboys, who met him at a dinner at the Gyllenhaal house. After various performances in the films and episodes directed by his father, in 1999 she premiered October sky, based on the true story of a miner’s son who ended up designing rockets, and became a young performer to consider.
So much for taking two tests to play Frodo in The Lord of the rings. In the first one he wasn’t supposed to speak, just pick up the ring. Without understanding the symbolic value of the object, she made it in a slovenly manner, to Peter Jackson’s despair. Some time later, he faced the director again, who got angry when he heard him recite the dialogue, and told him that he was “the worst actor in the world”: the Californian Gyllenhaal had not been warned by his agents that he had to speak with an accent. British. And it didn’t go well when he was a finalist, although he sings very well and it is his passion, to star. Moulin Rouge! along with Heath Ledger (with whom he would coincide some time later) and Ewan McGregor (who finally took the character of Christian).
But those rejects were compensated by the success of Donnie Darko (2001), the drama about youthful melancholy par excellence that catapulted him as an actor indie to continue at just 20 years old. His rise to stardom advanced when he played Dennis Quaid’s son in the blockbuster The day after tomorrow, stumbled after losing the opportunity to play Batman in Batman Begins (both Christopher Nolan, on this occasion, and Baz Luhrmann, in Moulin Rouge! They called him to explain why they had not chosen him, he confessed, grateful for Gyllenhaal’s gesture a few weeks ago in the promotion of Road House) and was crowned by being, along with Heath Ledger, the gay cowboy couple of Brokeback Mountain (2005), with which he obtained his only Oscar nomination. A friendship was also born, cut short by the death of his co-star: Gyllenhaal is the godfather of Ledger and Michelle Williams’ daughter, Matilda. They were both united by interpretive intensity.
From that moment on, Gyllenhaal combined all types of auteur films, such as two with Denis Villeneuve, Prisoners and Enemy, and one with Sam Mendes (Jarhead), David Fincher (Zodiac), Jean-Marc Vallee (Demolition) or Jim Sheridan (Brothers). Of course, he was giving clues that the action was calling him, although it didn’t work out: Source code either Redemption —his first collaboration with Fuqua—didn’t work out, although at least they didn’t become the terrible disaster in 2010 that was Prince of Persia: the sands of time, to the stupor and pain of the Disney company. Gyllenhaal has never suffered anything like it, and even today his failure is remembered: in the first book written by the actor, and intended for children, The Secret Society of Aunts and Uncles, illustrator Dan Santat placed in the background, among the audience watching the protagonist, a 10-year-old aspiring dancer, dance, a person with a sign that reads “The Persians,” a moment that Gyllenhaal, who did not notice until was printed, recognizes as the lowest of the kid.
Gyllenhaal continued acting in theaters; he approached the Oscar with nightcrawler (where he was a con man who immersed himself in the world of television journalism of events at night in Los Angeles) and maintained the pleasure of playing in films as radical as Okja (2017), by South Korean Bong Joon-ho for Netflix; Nocturnal animals, by Tom Ford, or What burns with fire, by Paul Dano. With a beard he looked older and intellectually heavier; without it, youth and lightness. In the Pyrenees of Huesca she took photos (with the Golden State Warriors shirt) with the local inhabitants during the filming of The Sisters Brothers (2018) and left a good taste in the mouths of its creative team: director Jacques Audiard and screenwriter Thomas Bidegain. Few could have expected what was going to come next.
Since the French western (although filmed in English), Gyllenhaal has not made arthouse films again. Instead, with Spider-Man: Far From Home A period of punches, shots and fights began. AND remakes. The only time it seemed like Gyllenhaal was going to return indie, the same sank the project. During lockdown, Bidegain offered him and Vanessa Kirby to star in Suddenly, English adaptation of the French novel Soudain seuls, which tells the story of a couple fighting to survive on an island, when they were enjoying the trip of their dreams. For a year, over Zoom, Gyllenhaal and Bidegain polished the script in collaboration with David Lindsay-Abaire, and the actor joined the production side.
In Variety, The Basque-French screenwriter explains: “We had just done a new version of the script that incorporated the latest changes, and I did a lot of zooms with Jake and Vanessa, so I thought the three of us were on the same page. So when we met in Iceland, I figured we’d put the finishing touches on it.” With eight weeks left until the opening clapboard, the three got together on the island, and they exploded. Gyllenhaal had an epiphany during a walk where he encountered a horse, and decided that “it shouldn’t be a movie about love, but a movie about the love of nature.” Bidegain claims that Kirby, for his part, insisted that the film have a more defined feminist touch with a radical ending. The screenwriter says his vision for the film was somewhere in between: “It’s a film about love, but also about the love of nature, and it has a strong female character.” On the fourth day, Bidegain returned to Paris, filmed it with French actors with half the budget and it was released in his country last December. In Variety, Bidegain insists the problem was that he had never worked with an actor who was also a producer. “It is a very strange experience when you work with an actor-producer who does not have the same vision as the director: in France, the director is the one in charge of telling the story, the script, the scenery….” Curiously, Gyllenhaal has been living in Paris for several months a year due to his relationship with the French model. Jeanne Cadieu.
In the United States, Gyllenhaal is popular for another disagreement, this time in love: in 2009 he and Taylor Swift were a couple for three months. The breakup caused the singer pain that inspired the song All Too Well, of the disk Grid, which was released in October 2012. In November 2021, Swift released Grid again re-recorded with an extended version of the song and a video-short film, directed by Swift herself, in which the actor Dylan O’Brien is a carbon copy of Gyllenhaal. A wave of anger against Gyllenhaal flooded the internet for weeks.
In a profile about him in Esquire In March 2022, as a result of this career change, Villeneuve assured: “Jake is definitely happier, more at peace,” and Fuqua, who is “much calmer, a little more open” and seems “to be having more fun.” And I think that’s maturity.” Maybe that’s why he wants to play more: his next release will be In The Grey, another about shooting and action with Guy Ritchie. Later in spring 2025, Gyllenhaal will be Iago and Denzel Washington will play Othello in a version of the Shakespeare classic that will mark the actor’s third production on Broadway. At least, his love for theater does not end.
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