Jarhead - doing a Swoff

It's been a while... time for some Gratuitous Swoff. I wouldn't like to say that this is a response to Jake Gyllenhaal making a public appearance on Thursday in a shirt that had far too many buttons for our own good, but that is a possibility.


I was also encouraged by a video that shows that Jarhead was not simply a waiting game for the soldiers in the desert, the whole shoot had a bit of an expectant and disappointing air to it if you were two of the extras in the squad. Or, as they put it, the two left over hot dog rolls, when all attention is on the lead: 'Jake Gyllenhaal is so cute'.



This video is well worth enjoying for a lot of reasons, but also because it shows how to act 'So Swoff' and because it contains a fine impression of Peter Sarsgaard and a not very fine impression of the Number 1 - Jamie Foxx. Let us hope that neither No. 12 nor No. 13 were the ones Peter and Jake discussed here: 'Peter: We definitely got attached to our weapons, especially after one us – neither Jake nor I, but another guy on the movie – managed to completely trash his M-16 during boot camp. Jake: We still hate him; it really upset us and I never thought I would be upset at someone for trashing a gun of any kind but I really was.'


And while I'm throwing around videos to do with Jarhead, here's a deleted scene from the movie that shows Jake playing with matches - please don't do this at home.



When one thinks of Jarhead, one remembers stunningly realised oil raining from red skies, or the frustration of soldiers fearing untrustworthy girls back home and an enemy they may never reach. A Gyllenhaalic, however, has other reasons to remember Jarhead. When the real Swofford wasn't making Jake read Hamlet, The Myth of Sisyphus (my own personal favourite) and The Portable Nietzsche, he also joked 'Well, I taught him those dance moves'. Fortunately, Swoff wasn't just a soldier who 'wanted to sit alone in the back of a Humvee and read'.


Sam Mendes described Jake's earnest desire for a role that would make him surprise himself: 'I felt like he had not been stretched at all as an actor, but he was ready to be. And just meeting him, he was desperate to be punished on some level - made to feel things that he'd never felt before. You could say that he probably felt he's had it ... not easy, but not that difficult in his young acting life. Because, you know, he entered at a young age, and he's a goodlooking boy, and he's got showbiz family and all that kind of stuff, and he's come up sensing that that was always where he was going to go. But he felt, on some level, that he hadn't earned it. And he wanted to earn it. He wanted to work, and he wanted to explore himself. And I couldn't be more excited about the performance he gives.'



As this is a gratuitous post, here is a video which allows us to focus on the cost that Jake's hair suffered for the filming of Jarhead - the before and after.



Pictures from Getty.