Jake Gyllenhaal's culinary skills are legendary. One can barely think of such foodstuffs as pickled onions, starbursts, strawberries, cilantro, risotto, iPads and meatballs without thinking of Jake. In fact, he is one of the few people in the public eye who would be able to construct a plate of food and a piece of garden furniture from the same ingredients. This week, Jake appeared on The Chew, cooking alongside old friend and TV cooking partner Mario Batali. If you live in the US you can watch the clip here. Wouldn't it be great if internet files could be freed from borders?
Update! As you can see, there is now a version for us all. Thanks so much to Stephanie!
Thank heavens for IHJ. Looks like Jake's beard is coming on a treat. Anyone with a beard like that who eats spaghetti is a brave man (or woman, I don't want to be sexist).
Jake appeared on the Leonard Lopate radio show this week with fellow If There Is... cast member Brian F O'Byrne. I'm delighted to say that the interview is now available to listen to.
And finally...
Jake's charity work for New Eyes for the Needy (as well as his love of food) is being recognised on 29 October by a celebratory dining event that you can go to as well if you live near NYC and have $500. Not only does the money go to a good cause, but you can also see Jake, as well as Peter, Maggie and Top Brit Scout Bear Grylls, and, one hopes, get some good nosh too. Details are all here.
If any of you go, please remember to bag me some pudding.
There is also another one of those famous Jake auctions.
As End of Watch moves on to its next port of call - Australia on 1 November - the publicity machine shifts a continent, leapfrogging one or two on the way.
Jake Gyllenhaal is interviewed in Australia's The West today and in it he chats a little about growing up in Los Angeles, not too far away from those Mean Streets. And getting tasered. Apparently, it's better than having pepper thrown in your face. Not something I'd want to test. "Umm, the absurdity of my life. I love that I'm talking about being in the ganglands of south-east LA and now I'm getting served tea" - quite right too. Hopefully with sandwiches with the crusts cut off.
'"When I was a kid we lived on a street called Westmoreland. My dad had got this run-down house and he's a pretty great carpenter and he fixed out the whole house. Today that area has become more gentrified but when we were there it wasn't... It wasn't until years later when I started 'rolling around' for this film that I realised I had lived within a 20-block radius of what Rampart was," says the actor referring to where the infamous Los Angeles riots took place in 1992, the Rampart name becoming synonymous with crime and violence.'
Jake has also been interviewed for Hispanic Business. There is a little in there about filming the opening scene, which is spoilery so not included here, but there is also this about how Jake's view of urban life changed after making the film: 'It's hard not to, after having shared [the police officers'] world. There's this weird dichotomy of seeing the world with a little more paranoia, the possibility of something around that corner, and at the same time feeling stronger for it and more confident because of it. Feeling like there is a reality that I now know.'
As I write this Jake and Brian T Byrne from If There Is... are being interviewed on the Leonard Lopate radio show (details here) and hopefully a podcast will be available later. Thanks to BBMISwear for the heads up!
Meanwhile, a crew call for Jake's next (?) project Prisoners has revealed that the film will be shot in Georgia.
As sure as night follows day, as irrefutable as Jake Gyllenhaal not endorsing Romney, the media interest in Jake continues to soar. Hardly surprising, considering the rave reviews he has received for End of Watch and If There Is... and the speculation about new exciting roles to come.
The new UK quad poster for End of Watch (pictured above) was revealed today by HeyUGuys.
Jake has been talking to Wall Street Journal about An Enemy and Prisoners, in addition to lots about End of Watch:
An Enemy: We finished production on it at the end of July, and then I went right to rehearsals for the play. Denis Villeneuve, who directed it, is cutting it now. I play two roles in “An Enemy.” It’s actually the story about a man who is married and his wife is pregnant with their child. He, at the same time, in another personality is having an affair, and there are two personalities and he needs to reconcile the two in order to make a commitment to his marriage. It’s his journey reconciling both sides of himself. At the same time, it’s a thriller on this whole other level, where there could be actually two people. What happens is a question of identity, when you meet yourself. So, there are two things going on but if we succeed at pulling that off – it was a fascinating process, and a very technical process, which I really enjoyed.'
Whether Jake will appear in Prisoners: 'I don’t know exactly. We’re talking about it, yeah. I hope so and I loved working with him [Villeneuve] and if I get to work with him again, it’ll be really exciting. It would be an evolution because my character [in “End of Watch”] does say, “I want to be a detective.."'
Earlier, Jake spoke to the Wall Street Journal again about acting on stage night after night in If There Is and how hard it is to cope with the physicality of acting: '[Laughs] I don't really think about that. Just given the experience I've had, even preparing for "End of Watch" and the police officers—the hours that they spend, the work that they do. My job just seems absurd, and the work and the time I put into it always seems a pittance in comparison. I try to feel great every night and I honestly feel blessed. Four hundred and fifty people actually fill up that auditorium every night to come see our show. All of us have been sick at one point or another, and we actually end up turning out better performances when we're more tired or our bodies are physically pressed.'
There is much, much more in these interviews so do check them out.
Paul Dano, recently announced for Prisoners, has been talking a little about the possibility of working with Jake. It would seem that people involved with Prisoners are a lot more certain about Jake's involvement in the film than he wants to admit to! 'I don’t think I can say much about Prisoners, since it’s in pre-production. I hung out with Jake once, and he was a really great guy, and we meant to hang out again. I’ve never met Hugh. I hear he’s a good man'
Thanks to BBMISwear for the link to the first video and to IHJ for all they do.
Jake Gyllenhaal is clearly aiming to lend new meaning to the expression 'a tad busy'. Not only has his play got an extension - taking him almost all the way up to Christmas (everyone in the Gyllenhaal-Sarsgaard family will be receiving book tokens this year, including the babies) - and End of Watch is being released across the globe, then there's Prisoners to make and now we have confirmation that Jake is still to make Mississippi Grind next year. Not only that, it has a production month - May. Travelling down the Mississippi in May sounds good to me. The news comes from John Lesher, End of Watch producer who sounds very glad to be working again so soon with Jake.
This interview comes courtesy of the London Film Festival where Michael Pena has also been doing his bit to promote the movie. I must apologise to the End of Watchers for the classic October London weather but at least it wasn't foggy...
This seems like an excellent point to add a link to my review of End of Watch from the festival's Saturday screening.
There are some great new publicity shots for End of Watch over at IHJ. Here are a couple.
I wrote a guest post at Demention, a blog owned by novelists who look at the world a little differently. It's about time travel. You can read it here!
Busy days ahead for Jake Gyllenhaal! It appears that the play If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet has been so successful, with so many people clamouring for tickets, that its run has been extended by two weeks. It will have a well-deserved rest from 25 November and then resume on 8 December and carry on until 23 December. It sounds as if Jake wanted to earn some extra Christmas money now that he has another niece to buy for. Full details at Playbill.
The other big piece of news is that Prisoners has a release date before it's even begun. Deadline has announced that the film will be released on 20 September 2013. Less than a year away, this puts its release firmly in festival season. It is quite possible that next year we will see the release of both Prisoners and An Enemy - surely a film made for TIFF thanks to its Toronto background - within days of one another.
The non-news is that End of Watch premiered in the UK yesterday at the London Film Festival and there's not a jot of publicity for it. One can only hope that its PR team realise that a film does not cease to exist once it leaves US shores, especially if it wants bums on seats.
I'm seeing End of Watch at LFF tomorrow and so a review will follow this weekend.
Harris Savides, the great cinematographer who worked on Zodiac with David Fincher, died this week. A great loss. Take a trip back to April 2007 with this post on Harris, Jake and David.
Thanks very much to IHJ for the new photos of Jake at the TIFF press conference.
End of Watch has its UK premiere tomorrow at the London International Film Festival. The premiere is likely to be Jakeless and the film doesn't open in the UK until 23 November but it's good to see the film cross the pond. This might also mean the beginning of publicity over here. This is also a catch up time. Here is a taster of an interview with Jake Gyllenhaal for Sunrise in Australia in which Jake talks about how his friendship with Heath Ledger affected his performance in Brokeback Mountain for the better. It's always good to hear Jake talk about Heath and the Mountain. Always.
There is another interview here with Jake and Michael Pena by Ben Lyons, which I think I missed. There have been so many! Just watch what you say about Jake's mum....
There are another couple of videos showing the scene outside the If There Is Haven't Found It Yet theatre. Jake does seem more relaxed with the big theatre crowd now as he makes memories for an awful lot of people and fans.
Thanks to IHJ there are more photos from the production. Here is just one...
And finally
It's been announced that Paul Dano - one of the Loopers - is to join Jake, Hugh Jackman and Melissa Yeo in Prisoners, possibly as the kidnapper. There are more details here.
Talking of Looper, my review is up on MovieBrit. This weekend I'll be reviewing End of Watch as I'm fortunate to have a ticket for its Saturday screening at the LFF!
End of Watch continues to gather buzz. Next week it is shown at the London International Film Festival - I'll be there which makes me really rather happy - and the interest mounts. This week director David Ayer has been talking to Los Angeles Magazine about his road to End of Watch as well as what it meant to his stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena. It wasn't necessarily pretty.
'To make LAPD officers of Gyllenhaal and his costar Michael Peña, Ayer put them through five months of punishment. Several days a week Gyllenhaal reported to an Echo Park dojo run by a friend of Ayer’s. “Dave said, ‘I really need you to know what it’s like getting the crap kicked out of you and how to beat the crap out of somebody,’ ” Gyllenhaal says. “And in the beginning it just started with getting the shit beaten out of me by 14- to 20-year-old kids literally every morning. Towards the end I definitely got some good kicks and punches in on those boys.”'
'Instead of the couple of nighttime ride-alongs that have become obligatory research for cop movies, the actors spent weeks in L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, LAPD, and Inglewood police squad cars. Over yogurt and granola at a Silver Lake café, Ayer describes how during Gyllenhaal’s first time out, he saw a gunshot victim die on the street. “Jake called me up that night and he was like, ‘That shit changed me,’ ” says Ayer, who is 42. His head shaved, he wears cargo shorts and a plaid button-down shirt whose loose fit only manages to make his shoulders look more massive. “I’m like, ‘Good, that’s exactly what I was hoping.’ It was horrible, and I know it isn’t going to sound right, but my hopes were that in this process he would encounter some truth and some reality about what’s really going on in L.A.”'
There is much more here. Thanks to IHJ for the pics!
Last night (6 October), Jake was on hand in NYC to help Proof co-star Gwyneth Paltrow celebrate the big 4-0.
WDW Greenwich Interlude
Today was a beautiful Autumnal day and so we took off to Greenwich in London on the motorbike. Greenwich is a beautiful place - a World Heritage Site which is also the home of the prime meridian (where time equals zero), the Cutty Sark, the Christopher Wren Old Naval College, the Maritime Museum, the river in all its glory as well as 2012's Olympics equestrian events. Stunning, historic architecture can be found side by side with beautiful old pubs, shops and markets, not to mention the odd morris dancers. You might also spot some Tower of London and Tower Bridge in the photos below.
On the ride home, we stopped in the middle of the gorgeous Oxfordshire countryside to have a drink in a beautiful old pub. Once named the Admiral Nelson, it was renamed Lord Nelson when the man himself was elevated to a peerage all those years ago. The nautical theme continues.
I hope you've all had time to have a good GyllenCatchUp! Just as well because it looks as if more is on the way. It's been confirmed this week, thanks to Deadline, that Jake Gyllenhaal Is indeed set to star alongside Hugh Jackman in Prisoners. Due to start filming in early 2013 with a release later the same year, Prisoners will feature another police performance by Jake. This time, Jake will play Detective Loki, which reminds me of Thor's brother for some reason. The character is described as a 'hot shot detective', which leaves me none the wiser.
Thanks to IHJ for the behind the scenes photo from If There Is...
At the weekend, Jake was one of 60,000 people (although one of the hairiest) attending the Global Citizens Festival in Central Park, a huge charity event fighting poverty, which included bands such as the Foo Fighters. American news reader Katie Couric posted a photo of herself with a very buttoned up Jake at the Festival on Twitter.
Meanwhile, Jake and Maggie's dad Stephen has been discussing with Crave Online his own project Grassroots as well as reflecting on his pride in his childrens' work.
'I brought them to all the sets. They came to every set all the time. I didn’t let them see a lot of the movies. In fact, I don’t think they’ve seen all the movies from when they were little. Maybe more recently, because they were grown up movies, but any sets, they came to all the sets, they grew up on sets.'
Was there any doubt they would go into the business? 'Oh, I never thought for a second they would. It was never anything I thought of. We just didn’t think about that. They were kids. They were doing whatever they were doing. I didn’t understand that they were absorbing everything that was going on and it’s amazing to see how much they took in, but there was never any idea that they should do anything but what they wanted to do. Never for a moment. There wasn’t really even time to consider, “Well, are you going to become a doctor?” because they were so young when they started acting and then it just took off.'
Have you seen End of Watch yet? 'Oh yeah, I saw it. I’m actually in New York right now. I just saw Jake’s play as well. Yeah, I sawEnd of Watch. It’s terrific and he’s great in this play. I don't know how it happened but my kids are very talented.'
I'm delighted to include here another video from the Roundabout Theatre with the cast of If There Is, including Jake. Thanks to BBMISwear for the headsup!
