The 1952 song that became a “huge influence” on Jake Gyllenhaal’s career
Among the long list of people that Taylor Swift didn’t marry in New York earlier this month, but could have, is Jake Gyllenhaal. Only he knows whether that would have been a good idea, but given that he is a big music fan, at least he can take solace in the fact that he did, like lots of other celebrity men, go out with her, then break up with her, and then inspire a load of songs on one of her albums.
In Gyllenhaal’s case, that record was apparently her 2012 album Red, the same year that, whether coincidentally or deliberately making a statement, he appeared as a serial killer in a music video for the song ‘Time to Dance’ by French band The Shoes, with an extended clip that saw him quite graphically dispatching a series of hipsters who were daring to have a good time at parties.
Also that year came End of Watch, the super-tense thriller that saw Gyllenhaal as a no-nonsense LAPD officer dealing with gang members in South Central Los Angeles, which seemed to confirm his transition from the slightly weedy geek we’d seen in his early roles like Donnie Darko to a fully fledged, ‘not to be messed with’ lead man.
Since then, that’s mostly what he’s stuck to, with his time spent in the gym paying off in films like 2015’s boxing drama Southpaw, the 2024 reboot of Patrick Swayze’s Road House, and his venture into the world of superheroes with his role as the muscle-bound Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home in 2019, where he looked extremely ripped, even with some kind of strange goldfish bowl on his head.
But there has to be some contrast to the dark, and he showed he still had a lighter touch, and a link to music, in 2017 when he hit Broadway to star in Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George, a Tony Award-winning effort originally staged in the 1980s. It seems Gyllenhaal was inspired by another man who often switched between the big screen and Broadway, as he told KCRW while picking his favourite songs.
He revealed, “I would say ‘Inchworm’… because Danny Kaye was and is still a huge influence on me as an actor and a performer. I just watched him so much when I was a kid, and he had this love of entertaining, I think I’ve heard also about him this real love of children and caring for them, and you can tell that in this song.”
Performed by Kaye in the 1952 musical movie Hans Christian Andersen, ‘Inchworm’ is a pretty simplistic, nursery rhyme-style song that sees the legendary actor trying to teach kids maths while counting flowers, but its influence went far beyond what you might imagine at first glance.
It was subsequently covered by all manner of musicians, including Paul McCartney, and David Bowie even cited it as the major inspiration behind his classic 1980 track ‘Ashes to Ashes’, once saying, “There’s something so sad and mournful and poignant about it. It kept bringing me back to the feelings of those pure thoughts of sadness that you have as a child, and how they’re so identifiable even when you’re an adult.”
Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal is staying buff and violent after wrapping on Road House 2, which could arrive on Prime Video late this year, and he’s also signed up to lead a movie adaptation of the video game The Division, about a group of civilians trying to escape a post-pandemic New York City.
