Jake Gyllenhaal

Jake Gyllenhaal (birthname: Jacob Benjamin Gyllenhaal) belongs to a small group of major movie stars who have earned their global stature while playing leads in very few major blockbusters or franchises driving Hollywood box-office growth, such as the Marvel Comics Universe (his only appearance being Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019).

His impressive early starring roles in October Sky, with Chris Cooper (1999); Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001); Highway (2002), opposite Jared Leto ad Selma Blair; Brad Silberling’s Moonlight Mile (2002), with Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon, preceded one of his few forays in a disaster movie, Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004).

Gyllenhaal’s breakthrough occurred in 2005 as Jack Twist, his Oscar-nominated supporting role (opposite the late Heath Ledger) in Brokeback Mountain. But this year also saw Gyllenhaal delivering impressively opposite Anthony Hopkins and Gwyneth Paltrow in Proof and in Sam Mendes’ adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s wartime book, Jarhead, with Gyllenhaal playing the author.

Although it failed to become a box-office hit, David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), with Gyllenhaal co-starring with Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo, proved to become one of the decade’s most important movies.

After Zodiac, Gyllenhaal solidified himself as one of the most dramatic stars, including a blistering turn as an LAPD cop in David Ayer’s vivid End of Watch (2012), followed by a fascinating pair of movies he made back-to-back with writer-director Denis Villeneuve: Prisoners, co-starring with Hugh Jackman (2013) and the surreal mind-twister Enemy (2013).

His taste for edgy, off-beat roles was amply demonstrated during a busy period including Nightcrawler (2014), earning him SAG and Golden Globe nominations; Jean-Marc Vallee’s Demolition (2015); Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (2016) with Amy Adams; Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (2017), with Tilda Swinton and Paul Dano, who immediately thereafter directed Gyllenhaal in the acclaimed adaptation of Richard Ford’s Wildlife, with Carey Mulligan (2017); opposite John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix in Jacques Audiard’s film version of Patrick DeWitt’s Western black comedy, The Sisters Brothers (2018); as an eccentric art critic with Rene Russo in Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw (2019); and unusual solo performance as a desk-bound cop in the U.S. remake of The Guilty (2021).

Indeed, Gyllenhaal’s choices as an actor seem to violate the norms for top-of-credit stars. His starring roles in big commercial vehicles, like Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest (2015), Michael Bay’s Ambulance (2022), or the Tom Clancy pandemic-themed thriller The Division (2022) with Jessica Chastain, are more the exception than the rule.

At the same time, Gyllenhaal has built a serious stage career, with his Broadway debut in Nick Payne’s play, Constellations (2015), followed by a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (2017). He reunited with Payne on Broadway for Sea Wall/A Life (2019).