The two actors David Fincher hired on Jennifer Aniston’s recommendation
David Fincher has earned a reputation as one of the greatest auteurs of the modern age, his undeniable affinity for crafty, well-made, narratively gripping stories, particularly if they’re thrillers, winning him legions of fans across the globe, such that every one of his new releases generates buzz, which you can’t say about just anyone.
One of Fincher’s most acclaimed and beloved achievements is 2007’s Zodiac, inspired by the real story of the infamous ‘Zodiac Killer’, which was a tense, heart-pounding tale of murder and deception that took the world by storm upon its release.
It might have missed out on the Oscar window, but it still picked up a bunch of accolades across the board and has most impressively continued to inspire people, with the BBC calling it the 12th best film of the 21st century in a 2016 poll, while there are millions of fans still speculating the identity of the killer all these years later.
One of the many great things about the movie is its cast of Robert Downey Jr, Philip Baker Hall, Chloë Sevigny, and Brian Cox, making for a stacked selection no matter how you slice it. You probably noticed that we intentionally left off two prominent names from that list because the story behind how they joined the film is fascinating, and by Fincher’s own admission, he wouldn’t have even considered them were it not for an unlikely intervention.
“I was talking to Jennifer Aniston,” he said on the movie’s DVD commentary track, “We were talking about movies, and actors that she had worked with that she just loved, and Jake Gyllenhaal was one of them, and Mark Ruffalo was the other one. She was telling me just how unbelievably talented these guys were.”
As well as drawing from their substantial bodies of work up to this point, Aniston was also speaking from personal experience, having worked with Ruffalo on the Rob Reiner film Rumor Has It, in which they played lovers. As for Gyllenhaal, the Horrible Bosses star had appeared opposite him in the film The Good Girl, playing an older woman, while he was the young Catcher in the Rye-obsessed store clerk who has an affair with her. If you want to watch this film, make sure you look up the one released in 2002, and not the porno with the exact same name that came out two years later, a mistake, trust me, you would not want to make.
While that explains how Aniston knew the primary names, which brings to scrutiny how she and Fincher got close enough to have a conversation, seeing as she’s never been in any of his movies, and he certainly has never directed an episode of Friends. Well, it’s likely that the two knew each other through Brad Pitt, to whom she was married at the time, while the filmmaker had worked with him on Se7en and Fight Club.
Without this unusual source of inspiration, one of the most acclaimed movies of recent years would have looked very different, and I bet Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo are glad Fincher took the time to speak to Aniston, even though both parties had uniquely troubling experiences working on the picture.
