Jake Gyllenhaal’s unexpected rebirth as a permanently shirtless action hero
There comes a time in almost every fast-rising star’s career when they’re offered the chance to headline an expensive, action-packed, and effects-heavy production. In Jake Gyllenhaal‘s case, it proved to be such a woeful experience that he actively swore off returning to the genre for a decade.
With a breakthrough role in Donnie Darko under his belt, the actor first dipped his toes into the waters of spectacle-driven cinema with Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, decided it wasn’t for him, went on to notch an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, and tackled David Fincher’s Zodiac before his resistance was broken.
The end result was Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a film that clearly only existed so that Disney could try and replicate the successful Pirates of the Caribbean formula on sandy dunes. It didn’t work, and while it may have become the highest-grossing video game adaptation ever made after earning upwards of $330million at the box office, it still under-performed, and any plans for sequels were cancelled.
There was, of course, the inevitable whitewashing backlash to contend with, but for Gyllenhaal, he’d discovered first-hand that playing the lead in a major mainstream epic wasn’t the best use of his talents. Admitting that in the aftermath, he’d become “very thoughtful about the roles that I pick and why I pick them,” it was no coincidence he kept the blockbuster arena at arm’s length for nine whole years.
In between, he continued establishing himself as a formidable presence through the likes of sci-fi Source Code, haunting Denis Villeneuve duo Prisoners and Enemy, street-level crime thriller End of Watch, a career-best performance in Nightcrawler, and a transformative turn in boxing drama Southpaw. However, as soon as Marvel came calling, the floodgates opened, and it doesn’t look as if they’ll be closing anytime soon.
Speaking to the LA Times, Gyllenhaal acknowledged that he’d spent years avoiding tentpole, IP-focused titles, but Spider-Man: Far From Home twisted his arm. “It was one of those things that people have asked me for a number of years, ‘Are you going to do, do you want to do a movie like that, or if you were asked to would you?'” he said. The answer had been a firm ‘no’ up until that point, but fooling around in front of a green screen and running away from explosions has evidently awakened something deep within.
Since the web-slinging sequel, Gyllenhaal has essentially become a full-time action hero. He teamed up with Michael Bay for the frantic Ambulance, partnered with Guy Ritchie for the bullet-riddled war story The Covenant and will reunite with the filmmaker again for an as-yet-untitled actioner starring fellow beefcake Henry Cavill, and spent the majority of the recent Road House remake showing off his insanely jacked physique while repeatedly punching people in the face.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg, too, with Gyllenhaal also having Safe House and Morbius director Daniel Espinosa’s The Anarchists vs. ISIS lurking somewhere in development hell alongside militaristic video game flick The Division, as well as graphic novel adaptation and witness protection revenge story Snow Blind. He was also named as the lead of the apocalyptic comic book adventure Oblivion Song and was set to collaborate with John Wick writer Kurt Johnstad and Extraction director Sam Hargrave on bringing Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld’s Prophet to life, although he dropped out of that particular project in March 2024.
Still, the age of Jake Gyllenhaal: Action Hero has well and truly arrived, with the actor letting bygones be bygones to forgive Prince of Persia for being so terrible and mounting a prolific comeback to an art form he’d been dodging for nigh-on ten years.
