A Post of Two Halves: Jake Gyllenhaal's New Eyes and Jake gets lost in the desert... plus some fan questions!

After all the excitment of yesterday, I'm preparing to put my feet up while offering constructive tips to the England football squad and practising my French on the ref. But before all that I thought I'd knock a quick post into the back of the net and and warm up with Jake Gyllenhaal. First off, I just saw this video of Jake answering some more fan questions, this time in Canada, and one of the questions is from a WDW friend! I hope you're reading tonight - Congratulations Silver!



As we touched on in yesterday's post, Jake is now chair of the New Eyes for the Needy foundation, taking his charity work to a new level. Aside from helping to raise funds and awareness for this excellent charity, Jake also shows that even the most beautiful eyes to look at may be not be the best to look through. I was that freckly kid in thick ugly specs held together by tape and maybe Jake knows a bit of what that's like - but without the freckles. We have some more pictures from Jake's visit to the charity on 24 May. You can see more here and learn more about the charity here.


'"Jake has been a great advocate for New Eyes for several years now," said Susan Dyckman, Executive Director of New Eyes for the Needy. "He has been instrumental to New Eyes’ fundraising through his help in gaining foundation grants - and with his celebrity, he has raised national awareness of New Eyes by promoting our cause in magazine profiles."' Excellent news - being a successful (and hot) actor can be fun, as Jake has said on many occasions through the PoP extravaganza, but it can also have huge benefits.


Talking of Jake's eyes, as is my wont to do on frequent occasions, their lack of vision has caused Jake a bit of trouble on occasion. Jake told Irish Examiner about his love of running: 'Any city or any place in the world that I have an opportunity to work, whenever I land, I always go out and run for a long time and eventually find my way back. I’ve never really encountered anything dangerous, but I have definitely gotten lost. I went out for a run in Morocco and decided to run straight into the desert, I rubbed my eye and my contact lenses fell out! I have really bad eyesight and so I can only see out of one eye. This was literally like a scene out of a movie – there I was lost in the middle of the desert until a little Berber kid found me and took me back home.’


If there should be a PoP 2, Jake neds to have a satnav fitted before he's let loose in that desert. Either that, or a team of volunteer escorts needs to be assembled.

Many thanks to Carol for the Irish Examiner and its article on Jake called 'Game boy'. Here is some more: ‘It’s a very weird thing for me, but I was starting to feel as I got older that I’ve done enough work. I thought I’m tired of taking myself so seriously. There’s a sense of like ‘let’s just have a good time’. If I were to go back to the eight year old in me, he would probably say to do the Prince of Persia. This movie was like awakening the kid in me and it feels more like me than ever.’


‘I really want to be in a musical and I definitely want to reinvent the idea of what a musical is and to bring a modernity to it, like what Once achieved. I would like to retell the story of Hans Christian Andersen. I’ve just finished two smaller movies – I don’t know how you can get much bigger than The Prince of Persia – but these are stories I want to tell. One is with Anne Hathaway that Ed Zwick directed and the other is with Duncan Jones who directed Moon.’


‘What we wanted to do was create a totally separate story and base most of the action from the video game in a sense of reality. One day on the set where I was jumping from pillar to pillar cutting the horses off their reins and at the very end the stunt guy did this incredible flip backwards and landed on his feet forwards. Jerry was on set and I remember him saying ‘that looks cool, but I don’t understand why he did that ornate flip’. ‘If you go back and look at Super Mario Brothers, the adaptation from the game to the movie, those performances and those stories I don’t think were too true to the game and they didn’t have enough courage to go their separate way.’



‘I now have perspective behind and in front of me. I have enough to regret and I also have stuff to look forward to. I consider there to be a huge separation between my work and my life and my family. These are things that I want to protect and that I care deeply about in my heart. Ultimately, although I love audiences and their responses to things, I know that those people love me and will be there for me, no matter what. My work I love, but I am beginning to get a sense of humour about it, because I don’t need to take any of it that seriously.’


So now, it's about time to settle down with Jake and watch England vs USA. Fortunately, no lasting damage was done when I accidentally set fire to my match-snack tortilla chips this afternoon, proving true yet again that age-old adage: 'when the oven ring is turned on, don't put a bag of tortila chips on it'. So who do we want to win....?

Scans by WDW (thanks Carol!) and pictures from New Eyes for the Needy.