There is a melancholic yet goofy quality to Jake Gyllenhaal. It has ensured that, in his short career, he has so far specialised in playing tortured adolescents. In the wonderfully bizarre Donnie Darko, his disturbed high-school student has apocalyptic visions that are inspired by a malevolent giant rabbit, while in The Good Girl, he was an obsessive loner whose pursuit of Jennifer Aniston’s older, married woman led to disaster. But Gyllenhaal (pronounced Jill-en-hall) has had enough of playing the neighbourhood weirdo. In fact, he’s almost dismissive of the parts that have established him as the brightest prospect among the young American actors, including Hayden Christensen, Josh Hartnett and Elijah Wood, who have emerged in Hollywood over the past couple of years. “I don’t think those will be my favourite roles,” he says, in a soft voice, “because it’s easier to play a dysfunctional character than it is to join the world and be a part of it and deal with all the things normal people have to deal with.”
Now he has his first chance to play a conventional hero in The Day After Tomorrow, the latest disaster movie from the German director Roland Emmerich, who gave us Independence Day and Godzilla. This time around, it’s not marauding aliens threatening the world, but a man-made catastrophe.
Global warming has changed the planet’s weather patterns so that a new ice age is upon us, and Gyllenhaal’s plucky college student has to keep a small group of survivors alive in a desolate, frozen New York until his climatologist father, played by Dennis Quaid, can come to the rescue.
It’s a conscious change of pace for the 23-year-old. “Part of me says that I want to do the movies that I want to do, but I did want to see if I could do a big action movie,” he admits. We are meeting in a Paris hotel room, and he’s jet-lagged; his thick brown hair is all over the place, and he’s scruffy, in jeans and a T-shirt. But he can’t disguise the good looks that have made him a pin-up for teenage girls in America.
Along with the unwelcome attention that his two-year relationship with the equally hot young actress Kirsten Dunst has brought him, it’s all rather embarrassing for the thoughtful Gyllenhaal. He takes his job seriously, so he has avoided formulaic high-school movies, and was ambitious enough to make his West End stage debut — in Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, a three-hander about Manhattan slackers — when he was just 21, two summers ago. He earned rave reviews, as well as winning Outstanding Newcomer at the Evening Standard’s theatre awards.
Above all, he claims, he picks his projects based on the story alone. “I know it’s almost astonishing for an actor to want to be involved in a movie for the idea of it and not for the character you’re going to be playing, but that’s kind of how I choose almost every movie I do,” he says. “This movie raises questions about globalisation and the fact that we’re coming together through communications and transportation. My favourite part of the whole movie is when everyone has to be evacuated to Mexico.”
Watching the surviving American population fleeing south of the Rio Grande, with the president writing off Latin America’s debts in return for sanctuary from the weather, does provide a certain frisson, but in true Hollywood fashion, the film presents a rather more compassionate US government than the one currently in power. “Yeah, but I think the American people and the administration are two different things,” says Gyllenhaal. “America is still a young country, and I think the mistakes it has made, other, older countries have made in the past.”
Politics aside, he was more interested in his character’s relationship with his father. Families, and their various traumas and conflicts, are something of a Gyllenhaal obsession. “Look at my movies and then say that I come from a happy family,” he jokes. “No, the family in this is like a metaphor for humanity’s neglect of the environment, and that same sort of effect can happen to a family when a family member acts a certain way. Neglect in a family, or pain in a family, is something I think I understand well. So that’s what I took seriously.”
The puzzling thing is that, by any standards, the Los Angeles-born and -raised Gyllenhaal comes from what appears to be a happy, successful family. His father is a film director of Dutch descent, his mother is an Oscar-nominated writer (for 1988’s Running on Empty), and they are still together; and Gyllenhaal’s older sister, Maggie, is a daring actress who has been seen in Secretary and Mona Lisa Smile. So what exactly is the problem? “We have all not been happy in the past.
I speak for everyone in my family when I say that,” insists Gyllenhaal. “I think we all struggle with intimacy in every aspect of our lives, in every relationship, and just because you become a parent, it doesn’t mean that you’re better at it than anybody else. It’s just the nature of human beings. We’re imperfect.” Certainly, the one time he has appeared with his sister on film — in Donnie Darko, when, confusingly, she played his sister — their on-screen relationship was authentically fractious. Is that the case in real life? “Well, siblings are inherently competitive, but we’ve both changed a lot, and now we say, ‘Why aren’t we supporting each other more?’ There are enough people we’re competing with who want to take us down. I’ll call her if I’m having a hard time with a character. I call her more than she calls me. She never calls me with that kind of stuff.”
It was Maggie who introduced him to Dunst, so he owes her one, and it was watching his dad direct the likes of Jeremy Irons and Dennis Hopper, in films such as Waterland and Paris Trout, that inspired his choice of career. “I think it was inevitable. When you’re around that kind of energy,” he says, “it’s hard not to think, ‘I wonder what it would be like if I did that?’” He made his debut, in City Slickers, when he was just 10, but his parents wouldn’t allow him to become a full-time child actor.
“They’d let me audition, thinking I wouldn’t get the part, then I’d get the role and they’d be like, ‘What are we going to do? We can’t let him do it, he’s got to stay in school.’ I don’t think they were so calculating that it was about trying to put me off by getting me to learn about rejection at an early age — that would have been really f***ed-up — but I think they really wanted me to stay in school.”
His parents were the reason he went to Columbia University for two years, where he studied eastern religions under Robert Thurman, Uma’s dad. “I was probably doing it for them,” he says. But his stint as a student of Buddhism has left its mark. “I haven’t really found happiness in material success — wanting more hasn’t brought me happiness. Now I realise that whenever I want something more, it’s not going to make me happy,” he muses. “I’m not a card-carrying Buddhist, but I do try to practise mindfulness.”
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