Jake Gyllenhaal started acting when he was just ten years old, all the way back in 1991’s City Slickers. That means he’s been making movies for 30 years; and during his three-decades-long career, he’s played a lot of very different characters. He’s been everything from a bubbled-headed Spider-Man villain, a cowboy struggling with his sexuality, and even the boy in the bubble (he must love bubbles).
Unsurprisingly a few of his roles have been a little odd, to say the least, and that’s something Gyllenhaal is very aware of. He recently posted a “red flag meme” on Instagram highlighting some of his more unusual parts. The four roles he decided to call out were The Guilty, Okja, Bubble Boy, and Nightcrawler.
Now it’s worth pointing out we don’t think he’s calling these movies bad, just highlighting how odd the characters he’s playing are. We believe this because out of the four films he’s highlighted only Bubble Boy isn’t ranked fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. The only thing the four roles have in common is how eccentric they are.
Gyllenhaal may have been working in Hollywood for a long time but he’s already admitted that his newest Netflix movie, The Guilty, is one of the most stressful shoots of his career. In the thriller movie Gyllenhaal plays a police officer taking 911 calls when a woman is kidnapped.
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Almost the entire movie takes place from his perspective as he talks to various co-stars over the phone. As such Gyllenhaal didn’t get much of a break during the intense 11-day shoot. Adding to the pressure was that his co-stars phone conversations weren’t pre-recorded they were all done live.
“Everything was live,” he told news.com.au. “We had actors all over the world, so we devised this system where we sent out recording devices… They all called into zoom and our first [assistant director] would cue them. And we’d do 20-minute long takes, so about 20 pages a day and one while long take.”
Gyllenhaal claimed that while this made the film fun to shoot it also made it a stressful shoot. For [the director] and I, it was a challenge of trying to make this movie in 11 days. It added to the pressure of it, but we also upped our game. It was fun to try and do. It was also scary, frankly,” he explained. “No one was making movies at that time, we had to figure out how to do it safely. That made the pressure of the movie, unlike anything I have ever done.”