Interview: Jake Gyllenhaal

Things aren’t always what they seem on the surface.

Just ask Jake Gyllenhaal, the 34-year-old actor who upends expectations each time he steps in front of the camera.

From the forbidden cowboy romance of Brokeback Mountain in 2005 through the jut-jawed heroics of Source Code in 2011, the doomed buddy-movie cop camaraderie of End of the Watch in 2012, and the creepy villainy of last year’s Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal has offered a different emotional face to the world every time out.

For his newest, the pummeling boxing drama Southpaw, he shows a different face and physique, having turned himself into a ripped machine named Billy Hope, who serves beatdowns and knockouts like a catered lunch. As many who’ve seen the trailer can attest, he’s nearly unrecognizable at first.

Because of the actor’s ability to mutate so completely into what the part demands, writer Mark Harris, in a smart Grantland.com essay on the actor’s career, says, “He’s not a personality; he’s a shape-shifter.”

Hope’s back story is that he’s an up-from-poverty boxer who hits it big, loses big, and then tries to get it all back, largely to re-connect with his young daughter who is taken away from him.

The sheer physicality of the Southpaw role — originally offered to Eminem, who turned it down — was only part of what attracted Gyllenhaal to the film directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, The Equalizer) and written by Karl Sutter (Sons of Anarchy, The Shield), guys whose work is always painted with large splashes of testosterone and bravado.

“I loved the idea of playing this guy who’s always fighting the system,” Gyllenhaal says by phone from Los Angeles. “He had overcome and thought he had defeated the system and realizes that rage didn’t get him anywhere because it ends up destroying his life.

“And I love the idea of the father-daughter relationship. He has to become a father because he didn’t know how to do that.”

Getting in the ring

All of that is well and good but it means about as much as a used mouthguard if Gyllenhaal doesn’t look convincing as a fighter.

“I do like movies that are physical and that you can be in the elements for real. You learn about a skill and have an experience that you wouldn’t normally have or know anything about,” he says, then laughs. “I didn’t really think about what it would mean to do it.”

Six months before filming began, Gyllenhaal undertook a punishing training routine that included body-bruising “two-a-days”: two, three-hour daily workouts. He had lost 30 pounds to play the rangy, nocturnal oddball in Nightcrawler. For Southpaw, he had to put that weight back on plus 15 pounds of muscle. By the end of the sixth month, he was capable of cranking out 2,000 sit-ups a day.

But things didn’t start off so well.

“I was blown away over how much work I had to do because of his rhythm, coordination and timing,” trainer Terry Claybon tells Yahoo Movies. (Claybon has some experience with Hollywood. He trained Denzel Washington for his boxing film, The Hurricane.)

But he was impressed with Gyllenhaal’s desire to learn. “Every day, he was eager to learn more and more about the sport,” Claybon says.

Fuqua says in Esquire UK that what Claybon did forged Gyllenhaal into Billy Hope. “When Jake [first] 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.”

The actor concedes he knew next to nothing about boxing.

“I didn’t know how to box when I started,” he says. “I was motivated by fear, the fear that I wouldn’t look like I know what I was doing. … I knew it would be hard to fake.”

There are lessons he takes from boxing that he uses all the time (and he still occasionally will do boxing training when he has the time).

“There’s a confidence that you have when your body and mind are capable of the things that boxing teaches you,” he says. “It’s about having confidence in one’s self. There’s nobody else but you [out there], so you have to learn how to do this and defend yourself.

“I walk with a different sense of confidence, especially when I’m performing onstage. There’s a sense of my own power, which is what boxing gave me.”

A new stage

In fact, the stage is a venue where Gyllenhaal gets to show even more of his personalities, including as a singer.

He has played the lead in Little Shop of Horrors and finished a run on Broadway in March, in the play Constellations. This is one reason why he traded the West Coast for East Coast and moved to New York City a few years back.

“I’m getting on the stage more often now, and it has been all about the craft,” he explains. “There’s a great respect for craft on the stage and you can’t get by without it. So that’s changed my perspective. … All of the success that comes from making movies is amazing but I just go out and do what I do.

“And moving to New York allowed me to work with people who are making you the best at your craft. That’s a huge change as an actor.”

Such a path might not have been predicted for the young Gyllenhaal, the son of Hollywood industry veterans whose mom (Naomi Foner) is a screenwriter/producer (Running on Empty, Very Good Girls) and dad (Stephen Gyllenhaal) is a TV director (Rectify, Army Wives, Numb3rs). Sister Maggie (Adaptation, The Dark Knight, and TV’s The Honourable Woman, for which she was just nominated for an Emmy) is a successful actress in her own right.

He says his parents, who went through ups and downs in their careers, never dissuaded either him or his sister from acting.

“They knew it was highly competitive but I don’t think my parents would have dissuaded their children from pursuing their dreams,” he says. (Disclosure: Gyllenhaal’s uncle, Anders, is the vice president for news/Washington editor of The McClatchy Co., which owns the Star-Telegram and DFW.com.)

His early roles, Bubble Boy and the cult hit Donnie Darko (both 2001), didn’t necessarily point to the path that his career has taken. He even tried his hand at a more mainstream blockbuster with the unloved Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2010 (which ranks at a meager 36 percent on Rotten Tomatoes).

He was even a candidate for Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins.

But not getting those roles allowed him a certain freedom that comes from not being locked into a recurring superhero. It’s allowed him to be a cinematic chameleon.

“Gyllenhaal doesn’t have a persona that overrides and unites all of his roles — which, by some definitions, means he isn’t quite a movie star,” continues Harris in his essay. “He doesn’t have a ‘thing’ — the way, for instance, when Matthew McConaughey showed up in The Wolf of Wall Street, it was understood that his function was to provide five or 10 minutes of ‘Matthew McConaughey.’”

His next two films — Everest (coming out in September) and Demolition (spring 2016) — are as different from each other as they are from Southpaw. The former is an adventure film about an Everest hiking team slammed by a massive snow storm, while the latter is more of an intimate drama about an investment banker re-examining his life after the death of his wife.

Gyllenhaal professes no disappointment with roles he didn’t get nor with the roles that might not have gotten the recognition they deserved. Many Nightcrawler fans were crushed that he was not nominated for best actor.

If anything, he sees it all as a blessing in disguise.

“Everything is a blessing in disguise when you find yourself in a positive place,” he says. “People ask me about playing this role that Eminem was going to play. And I say, ‘I don’t think that matters anymore.’ Now, it’s my role.

“I feel the same way about parts going to other actors. It’s theirs and always has been theirs.”

Then he sums up with something that feels pure Gyllenhaal. “We all have our own path.”

This story was originally published July 22, 2015 at 10:57 PM with the headline "Interview: Jake Gyllenhaal."