“I can already see this in print,” teases Jake Gyllenhaal. With a wide, puppyish grin on his face, he is carrying two paper cups of scalding hot water and a box of PG Tips, tucked under his arm, from the set of his Vogue shoot to his interview. And while I hate to be a predictable reporter… well, here we are. It’s just such an unlikely scene – the Hollywood star making a DIY cuppa (two teabags, no milk, admitting that, really, Yorkshire Gold would be preferable) in a capacious photo studio in midtown Manhattan. But then, Gyllenhaal insists he is “about as British as an American can be”.
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Without getting too caught up in the nitty-gritty of his tea-making abilities (no milk?), it’s true that the 39-year-old actor is something of an Anglophile. He made his professional theatre debut at London’s Garrick way back in 2002, aged 21, in This Is Our Youth (also starring Anna Paquin and Hayden Christensen). “I felt this sense that I was among people who looked at things the same way I did,” he tells me of the experience, running a hand through his Disney prince hair, a faint huskiness to his voice.
Since then, he’s spent “five or six years cumulatively” in the capital, living everywhere from east London to Notting Hill. He adores Hampstead Heath – “I don’t think there’s any place like it in the world” – and often surrounds himself with Brits (he recently finished a Broadway run of Sea Wall/A Life with actor Tom Sturridge and director Carrie Cracknell). Oh, and he wants it to be known that his theatre etiquette is up to scratch. Unlike his American peers, he hates going backstage after a show. And, “I don’t applaud when actors come out on stage.”
So far, so British. His sense of humour is deliciously dry, too – drier than one might expect from an actor who, over an already long career, has become renowned for possessing a certain serious demeanour and earnestness towards his craft. I didn’t, for example, foresee the long chat we have about the impracticality of jumpsuits when going to the loo (“We digress,” he says. “Or do we?”), or for him to fix me with those famous eyes (my god, those icy blue, clear-as-the-Aegean eyes) and ask if I’d like a walk-on part in his new show.
Let me tell you, sitting on a banquette side-by-side with Jake in the dazzling sunlight, discussing whether I should play an art critic called Blair in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George – in which he was due to star at London’s Savoy Theatre this June until the pandemic hit – is a surreal treat. (This conversation happened, of course, before a question mark was placed over when our theatres would reopen.)
“She comes in and says [he puts on a breathy female voice], ‘George, Chromolume number seven.’ You should come in just for one guest spot, yeah? OK!” Such is his charm, for a second I’m tempted. Gyllenhaal will now reprise his role as Georges Seurat, the 19th-century French pointillist painter, on whom the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical is based, next year. First performed in 1984, and dealing with love, art and human connection, it’s a show of two distinct halves. The first follows a single-minded Seurat as he tries to complete his masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, ignoring his many critics as well as Dot, his mistress and muse (played by Annaleigh Ashford), in the process. The second is concerned with a fictitious great-great-grandson of Seurat – also named George, and also played by Jake – who is an artist in present-day America, and is equally obsessive about his work at the cost of his personal life.
The show first came to Gyllenhaal in 2016, when he was asked to sing some of the musical numbers for a concert in New York. The short run was a success, so when, a little later, a Broadway theatre became available for a couple of months, he suggested they stage it. The reviews were glowing, Jake a revelation. (He tells me, rightly proud, “It was really amazing.”)
“I do love acting in movies and I have had great luck,” he says, “but really I feel at home when I’m acting and singing simultaneously. It’s been that way since I was very young.” Yet musical theatre is not, I suggest, where people imagine him. Sunday is no jazz-hands affair, but it is a notoriously difficult score to sing. “I’d be so interested to know where they do put me,” he laughs. “I’ve tried to sneak out of those places my whole life.”
Born and raised in Los Angeles, he enjoyed something of a gilded early life as part of a liberal show-business family. His parents – director Stephen Gyllenhaal and screenwriter Naomi Foner (now divorced) – counted the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis and the late Paul Newman as close friends (Gyllenhaal knows them as godparents). His mother is “deeply feminist”, and Jake came of age “in a world with my mother hosting dinners at home with feminist groups and very powerful women in politics and Hollywood”. She supplemented his diet of Spielberg movies with Ken Loach films, which explains a lot. Now he lives in New York, close to his actor sister Maggie and an intimate circle of friends, some he knows from school, others, like Sturridge – “strong, so smart, funny” – he’s picked up along the way.
It’s true that he is an actor who has evaded pigeonholing – professionally and personally. He set the tone with cult indie flick Donnie Darko, his breakout role, in which he played the titular tortured teen. Four years later, he won a BAFTA for his exceptional work opposite Heath Ledger in Ang Lee’s landmark Brokeback Mountain, before playing a US Marine in Sam Mendes’s Jarhead and a serial-killer hunter for David Fincher in Zodiac. He has a reputation for going deep with preparation. For 2014’s Nightcrawler, he dropped 30lbs and barely slept to transform himself into a wiry conman, but he ran 15 miles a night to play a champion boxer in Southpaw. When, in 2017, he played Jeff Bauman in Stronger, a man who lost his legs in the Boston Marathon bombing, the two spoke every day for months.
While he’s yet to take up pointillism, he says he can easily identify with the mindset of Seurat, an artist consumed by work above all else. “Yes, I relate to that very deeply,” he explains sincerely. “That’s the struggle all the time.” But something’s changed in the past couple of years. “I’m interested in my life, even more so than my work. I’ve reached a point in my career where I feel hungry in a different way. I’ve seen how much of my life I’ve neglected as a result of being committed to that work and that idea.”
Basically, he’s “lightened up”. Some of it has to do with age, “seeing life as something that is, you know, fleeting, and the world being as it is now. I’ve turned to my family, I’ve turned to my friends and I’ve turned to love. I’m a little less interested in the work, I would say, and more interested in that.”
It sounds as though playing a neurotic artist has been transformative. He agrees, especially in the way it’s made him view his future. The George of Act Two, he says, experiences financial and critical success, but never had family. He recites his favourite line of the play: “Anything you do, let it come from you. Then it will be new. Give us more to see.” It makes him think of “the act of making love to make a child… the real thing is life. You get to the end of the show and that’s what it’s about. Children. Children and art.”
Do you see kids in your future, I ask? “Yes, of course I do,” he replies. “I definitely do. I think that’s probably the reason I see the end of the show the way that I see it. I know that’s why I see the end of the show the way that I see it.
“I’m not someone who has ever existed in a space where I’ve really known what’s coming next,” he says. “But you do have to be open to it. And there has been no other time in my life that I can safely say…” he trails off, but it’s clear where he’s going. Gyllenhaal is known for being fantastically private, and his past relationships with high-profile women – Kirsten Dunst, Reese Witherspoon and Taylor Swift among them – have been well, if often erroneously, documented. For the past couple of years, he’s been in a relationship with French model Jeanne Cadieu and, as he approaches 40, clearly has family on his mind.
But then, he’s always been very close to his own. “I have been raised by a wonderful father who was always affectionate,” he says. “My mother and my sister are some of the most extraordinary people I know. Our vulnerability with each other, our ability to communicate about how tough times can be is what I’m most proud of in my family. For everything I hope to pass on, that’s the most important. My mom always would say she saw me as a certain type of kid and she wanted to protect that. And admittedly, as much as they messed certain things up, they spent a great deal of time protecting that thing, that sensitivity, I think. I’m glad for that.”
He is pleased that men are beginning to find a way to be more vulnerable, too. “It’s very important we’re portraying men in a different way in film, in art. I remember being very young, very sensitive, and someone said I was a doormat.” He laughs incredulously. “I think what they were trying to say, that’s full of its own very interesting complications, was that I cared. And things affected me. That potentially I wouldn’t be someone you would picture jumping off a roof into an exploding building. But I don’t agree with that. When I did Jarhead, the writer William Broyles said to me, ‘You are like so many of the guys I was in service with.’ I think that’s important to perpetuate in storytelling.” He pauses, before joking: “At the same time, that might just be me trying to get more jobs.”
He has a strong network of friends – take a look at his Instagram and you’ll find photos of Tom Holland and Ryan Reynolds with accompanying hashtags #husbandgoals and #nationalbestfriendday. And when I tell him he is lucky and unusual, as a thirtysomething man, to have such solid relationships, he visibly wells up. “You’re making me feel very emotional about my friends,” he says, sweetly. “Those male friendships are very important to me.” Well, I say, there’s nothing nicer than knowing you’ve got your people. “We’re all desperate for it, aren’t we?” he says, looking at me with those searching eyes. And I guess he’s right: all that really matters is love and art and human connection.
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