The twists and turns of Jake Gyllenhaals unlikely, unsettling action career have brought him toRoad House.
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This article was originally published on March 4, 2024.Road Houseis now available to stream on Prime Video.
One of Jake Gyllenhaals first epiphanies about acting came at night on a misty golf course in Virginia.
(Donnie Darkois nuts.)
I can feel it still when I describe it to you, Gyllenhaal says.
They came to my close-up.
I started doing this sleepwalking thing.
And then I thought,Oh, shit.Poster told me I have to look at the camera.
I have to show my face.
Youre not going to be looking down dourly?
But now, on the golf course, he put it together.
My face is going down, but my eyes had to come up.
And then I found the character.
(Road Houseis also nuts.)
Early in the film, he drives onto some train tracks and sits there waiting to be plowed under.
They can speak to you of heartbreak and confusion and cool, raw calculation.
But somewhere behind those haunted eyes is a live-wire energy thats been swelling sinceDonnie Darko.
InRoad House, Gyllenhaal has never quite been as jacked and that really is the word: jacked.
Hes not just in shape.
Hes not just muscular.
He is jacked, as if something popped somewhere deep within and then blew him up from the inside.
When he fights, its fast and brutal.
This is a physical phenomenon, but theres a spiritual and psychological dimension to it.
After all, Dalton is a man trying not to lose his mind.
Most great Jake Gyllenhaal characters are.
Maybe it was a desire to push that out into the world and say, But wait!
Literally, no joke, I went, Im in, the actor remembers, laughing.
After all this hemming and hawing for over 15 years!
(Gyllenhaal is starring in the next untitled Ritchie film, too.)
I got an idea that it would be funnier if Dalton just slapped these guys, he says.
He had to unlearn things that would normally be second nature.
The note took mostly: McGregor did make contact once, by accident, while demonstrating a move.
It was really funny.
He was like, Oh!
I was like, Oh!
The first pass would capture what Gyllenhaal calls the Hollywood punch, where no actual contact is made.
The Hollywood punch is always selling the punch.
For the first of those, a red pad would be placed where an actor was punching.
Liman keeps his camera moving throughout these sequences, so the result is very fluid.
Onscreen, it all looks exciting and ridiculous.
His work in these movies yes, even the Spider-Man movie is often alive, raw, captivating.
McGregor has faced a number of troubling allegations over the years, includingsexual assault.
Yes, Gyllenhaal looks even more jacked.
Once upon a time, one could imagine packed audiences hooting and hollering along with a movie like this.
(Critics hated it.)
But he was never aware of conversations aboutRoad Housegetting a theatrical run.
My deal was always streaming from the beginning, he says.
That generation might not carry with them an image of Donnie Darko, all piercing eyes and savage susceptibility.
Or a picture of the grimy, rubbernecking cameraman ofNightcrawler.
Or even his knee-high-sock-wearing eccentric in Bong Joon Hos 2017 Netflix film,Okja.
Their Gyllenhaal is shred to high heaven, his chin having ascended significantly over the past 25 years.
