Article from DETAILS magazine:
http://men.style.com/details/featur...id=content_4026
[Text reprinted below]
Jake
By Benoit Denizet-Lewis; photographs by Tom Munro
It's not easy being Jake Gyllenhaal, what with everyone falling in love with you all over the place. Blue-eyed and muscular, with perfect brown hair, thick eyebrows, and consistently heavy stubble, the 24-year-old combines an unforced masculinity with a boyish openness and curiosity. He's not easy to pigeonhole, and he's also disarmingly down to earth, although he'd rather you not say that. "It bothers me when people say, 'Oh, you're so down to earth—for an actor,'" Gyllenhaal tells me over dinner at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. "Even when they don't say 'for an actor,' I feel like that's the implication. Why are the standards so low for performers? I mean, I appreciate it, but it's still funny that people say that all the time."
People aren't likely to stop anytime soon. Gyllenhaal, that broodingly sexy scene-stealer of small, offbeat films, is about to go very big with starring roles in two of the most anticipated movies of the year. The first, Jarhead, directed by Sam Mendes and based on the best-selling Gulf War memoir by Anthony Swofford, features Gyllenhaal as a disaffected marine. At first glance, he seems like an odd choice for the role of "Swoff." In previous films (Donnie Darko, The Good Girl, Moonlight Mile, and October Sky), Gyllenhaal has played some variation of the sensitive, complicated, mischievous, misunderstood American youth. But Gyllenhaal says he desperately wanted the lead, and he reportedly beat out Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio.
"My perception of Jake before I met him was that he was one of those drippy indie boys, doe-eyed and always feeling sorry for themselves," says Mendes. "But when I saw him onstage [in the London production of This Is Our Youth], he had a masculine presence I didn't expect. He does things in Jarhead where I had to step back and say, 'Wow, I didn't know you had that in you!' There are moments when he is really ugly, both physically and mentally."
That goes double for his performance in Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee's beautiful and haunting adaptation of Annie Proulx's New Yorker story, which brilliantly depicts a complicated and painful affair between two young cowboys. Gyllenhaal plays Jack Twist, who is paired with strong, silent type Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) to herd sheep in 1963 on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. After plenty of drinking on a cold night, Jack—the more easygoing and talkative of the two—invites Ennis into his tent, where he's soon cuddling up to him. Ennis freaks out, Jack doesn't take no for an answer, belts come frantically undone, clothes come frantically off, and one of them gets frantically fucked. It's a startling sex scene, and it's followed the next morning by predictable affirmations of heterosexuality ("You know I ain't queer"; "Me neither"). But soon enough they're back at it.
By the end of the summer Jack and Ennis are clearly in love, but they can't verbalize or acknowledge it. So they ignore it. The rest of the film follows them as they go on with their respective lives, never able to fully commit to each other but never able to completely let go of each other, either. "Brokeback Mountain takes all your conceptions of America, and the Western, and cowboys, and sexuality, and love, and it stirs them all up," Gyllenhaal says. "In the end, it's about how fucking hard it is to love somebody, to really be intimate, to really let go and be open to that, no matter what the context."
Gyllenhaal stresses to me the universality of Brokeback's story ("My character could have been played by a woman and it would have made just as much sense," he says), but I'm astonished when he says that he doesn't believe Ennis and Jack are gay. "I approached the story believing that these are actually straight guys who fall in love," he says. "That's how I related to the material. These are two straight guys who develop this love, this bond. Love binds you, and you see these guys pulling and pulling and tugging and trying to figure out what they want, and what they will allow themselves to have."
One of the film's producers, James Schamus, is as surprised as I am when I tell him that Jake perceives his character as straight: "Did he really say that? Well, I suppose movies can be Rorschach tests for all of us, but damn if these characters aren't gay to me. I think what Jake might have meant is that these guys lived outside of a social construction of a gay identity. There was no such thing as a gay identity for a cowboy in 1963."
If you believe the rumors in the blogosphere, Gyllenhaal might be looking for his own gay identity. In the month before I met him, two seemingly conflicting rumors circulated. The first claimed that Gyllenhaal gave way to a body double for Brokeback Mountain's nude scenes. The second said that he is bisexual and looking for an opportunity to come out.
Gyllenhaal flatly denies using a body double. As for his sexual orientation, he says this: "You know, it's flattering when there's a rumor that says I'm bisexual. It means I can play more kinds of roles. I'm open to whatever people want to call me. I've never really been attracted to men sexually, but I don't think I would be afraid of it if it happened."
The day after our dinner, Gyllenhaal invites me on a walk with him and his German shepherd, Atticus, in Runyon Canyon, a 160-acre park near the Hollywood Hills. It's a sweltering morning, and soon enough Atticus and I are panting and looking for shade. Eventually we come to rest on a bench facing a huge hill in the distance. Atticus scoots under the bench.
have yet to ask Gyllenhaal about Kirsten Dunst, and I figure that this is as good a time as any. But he'll have none of it. "I don't want to talk about that," he says politely. When I ask him why, since he used to talk openly about their relationship, he says that was "before there was such an insane interest in it."
Indeed, Jake and "Kiki" (Dunst's nickname) inspire only slightly less rabid interest in the gossip rags than Jessica and Nick do, and the fever only spiked when Gyllenhaal and Dunst, supposedly no longer a couple, recently began appearing everywhere together, including attached at the lips poolside in L.A. (If one celebrity magazine's "body-language expert" is to be believed, the couple is not only reunited but "very much in love.")
Since I've gone and ruined the moment, I change the subject to one of Gyllenhaal's favorite topics: meditation and spirituality. Gyllenhaal studied Eastern religion at Columbia University before dropping out to concentrate on acting, and he says he tries to meditate every day. "I hope I'm a spiritual person," he says. "I'm trying to be a spiritual person."
But how, I want to know, does he stay spiritually balanced? After all, he is literally a child of Hollywood—his father, Stephen Gyllenhaal, is a director (Losing Isaiah), and his mother, Naomi Foner, is a screenwriter (Running on Empty)—and he grew up surrounded by stars: Paul Newman taught him how to drive. Jamie Lee Curtis is his godmother. The road to keeping it real, he admits, has not been easy to find.
"I think even a few years ago I needed a lot more validation," he says. "I needed everyone to like me and think I'm great. But that attention doesn't work for me anymore. I realize that there's nothing at the end of that, so I can either use the validation to try to fill an insatiable hole or I can realize that this job is never going to do that. And yet I still love to act and I still love movies, so how do I approach this in the right way?"
He occasionally approaches it in an annoying way. During the filming of his biggest box-office hit to date, last year's $186 million blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, the actor was difficult, he admits, often more concerned with being "really artsy" than with hitting his marks. Dennis Quaid, who played Gyllenhaal's father, sat him down and set him straight. "He's like, 'You gotta chill out, it's an action movie,'" Gyllenhaal recalls.
That stubborn streak of individuality can complicate relationships off-set as well. During the filming of Jarhead, Gyllenhaal and his costar Peter Sarsgaard, who happens to date Gyllenhaal's actress sister, Maggie, got into a bitter dispute over an incident neither will now discuss. But they eventually buried the hatchet and are good friends again. "He's completely into whatever he is doing in the present moment, and that draws people to him," says Sarsgaard. "But let me tell you, it can also be really annoying. Sometimes he's just too eager. Especially in the morning. We would be driving to the set, and he would be all revved up and play 'Candy Shop' five times in a row. I'm like, 'Can you please turn off that fucking song?'"
Not even Academy Award–winning directors can find the switch on Gyllenhaal. "I say this very lovingly, because Jake is wonderful and brilliant, but he can be a little bit of a pain in the ass," says Mendes. "If he gets a bee in his bonnet, he won't let it go. He'll just get blocked sometimes and basically gets stuck putting too much importance on one scene, or trying too hard with being absolutely brilliant. He's also the least technical actor I know. If I say to him, 'Lift the gun at the point when you turn,' he can't do it. He's not an actor who's designed to hit marks. So I just let him do his thing. And I'm not worried that he'll be hurt by what I just said. In a weird way, what turns him on is criticism."
It's not easy being Jake, what with everyone want-ing you. But being wanted is boring. Being tested—well, now, that's something else altogether.
Jake Gyllenhaal addresses bisexual rumors
<-----BYE BYE SARAH!!!
when can i rent this?? by the way, straight guys dont fuck their guy friends. i think its odd when he says they're "straight guys". its one thing to love your friend, its another to do some ass packin'. is he mental?
If the mind, that rules the body, ever so far forgets itself as to trample on its slave, the slave is never generous enough to forgive the injury, but will rise and smite the oppressor. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Why does it make me think of Ricky Martin, though? Does he have a bunch of luscious ladies in his videos to compensate for his gaydom?
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