Jake Gyllenhaal reveals the best acting advice he was ever given: “It was a huge lesson”
When you’re born into an acting family, it usually doesn’t take long for you to find your way into a movie. Just ask Jake Gyllenhaal.
The son of a director and a screenwriter – and brother of an equally successful actor/director – Gyllenhaal made his movie debut at the age of ten in the comedy western City Slickers. A decade later, he led the cast in Richard Kelly’s ultimate cult tale, Donnie Darko. Since then, he’s gone from strength to strength, leaving that little boy who once played Billy Crystal’s kid in the dust.
In between City Slickers and Donnie Darko, a young Gyllenhaal starred in a movie called October Sky. From Joe Johnston, the man who made Jumanji, the film tells the real-life story of a young boy overcoming the odds to achieve his dream of becoming a rocket scientist. Gyllenhaal plays the lead character, who has the absolutely bonkers name of Homer H Hickam Jr. That is fantastic. Alongside the future megastar, the cast also includes Chris Owen, Laura Dern, and, most importantly, Chris Cooper.
Speaking to Refinery 29, Maggie’s brother recalled working alongside Cooper, who plays his character’s mining-obsessed father. While shooting a scene, Gyllenhaal remembers his on-screen dad taking him to one side to give him a little bit of acting advice.
“After the second take, he just stopped me and said, ‘You’re not listening. You need to listen; you’ll find something there,’” he remembered. I just started to listen to what he was saying in the scene, it was just that simple. All of a sudden, the things he was saying started to hit me in a way that I knew what to say, and it came out of me that way. It was a huge lesson to me, about taking away everything else and really listening to the person in front of you and then responding accordingly.”
Cooper can best be described as a ‘journeyman’ actor’. While never becoming a mainstream megastar – certainly not to the level of his fictional son – he’s turned up in some really great stuff.
Even after he won an Oscar for his role in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, he went back to quietly providing excellent performances in the background of other people’s star vehicles. The average person on the street might not know who he is, but you’ll struggle to find him being bad in anything.
These are exactly the kind of actors that give the best advice. They’ve been in the game long enough to know all the tricks of the trade, but aren’t going to try and sabotage their fellow thespians out of concerns for their own fragile egos. These long-serving character actors are the backbone of the movie industry and have more than a few tales to tell if somebody is willing to listen.
Gyllenhaal has spoken very fondly about October Sky as a whole, having never forgotten it even after his career skyrocketed (pun fully intended). The film itself is pretty good, but it’s almost certain that the lesson he learned from Cooper is meant it’s stuck in his memory for so long.
