Jake Gyllenhaal takes the lead in the movie Southpaw.
Jake Gyllenhaal takes the lead in the movie Southpaw.
He has played everything from a gawky teen to a gay cowboy. Now, Jake Gyllenhaal has turned himself into a bulked-up boxer. He spars with Elaine Lipworth.
It's early in the morning, and Jake Gyllenhaal is sprawled across a sofa, his long legs stretched out over the coffee table in an LA hotel suite. There's an empty plastic food container beside him; he's drinking orange juice. So what did he have for breakfast?
"I had a sandwich," he says.
What kind of sandwich?
"There are some things I keep to myself, that are my business ... " he replies. An uneasy silence follows.
"Have you been to the gym this morning?" I continue, regardless.
"No."
Rachel McAdams and Jake Gyllenhaal star in the movie Southpaw.
Having met him before, I should have remembered that the intensely private and rather serious actor doesn't cope well with small talk. But to my relief, Gyllenhaal bursts out laughing, realising the absurdity of the moment. By way of an apology for his brusque response, he explains that the obsessive interest in everything he does can be frustrating. "I feel like unfortunately most of the focus right now is on the external, as witnessed by most of the things that come out in the press."
Gyllenhaal has a point. Like many of his A-list peers, the star of the 2001 cult favourite Donnie Darko, the moving Brokeback Mountain (2005) and the blockbuster Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time (2010) is constantly scrutinised, his love life, or lack thereof, under the microscope.
Still, my questions about Gyllenhaal's diet and workout regimen are relevant. In last year's creepily compelling Nightcrawler he lost 30lbs to achieve the skeletal, haunted look of his character; he did it by running 24km a day and eating nothing but kale salads. Today we're meeting to talk about his gritty new boxing drama, Southpaw, in which the 34-year-old is practically unrecognisable: ferociously bulked up, heavily tattooed, veins popping.
Jake Gyllenhaal as Billy Hope in the film Southpaw.
Gyllenhaal piled on muscle to portray fictional light-heavyweight champ Billy Hope, whose life and career fall apart after the murder of his wife (a terrific performance from Rachel McAdams). Forest Whitaker plays the seasoned trainer with the task of getting him back into shape.
"I didn't know how to box and I was just terrified that I'd look like an idiot in the ring," says Gyllenhaal, who is outstanding in the role. "That was a motivation for me getting in shape."
He didn't have a stunt double and was pummelled in the brutally realistic fight scenes. "I don't think you can claim you're a boxer without knowing how it feels to be hit," he explains. The actor spent five months in the gym - two punishing three-hour workouts, seven days a week, 2000 sit-ups a day. "The first part of the day was all technique, learning how to throw punches, footwork, and the second part of the day was getting into shape and getting ready for sparring. A physical transformation was key to making the character credible," says Gyllenhaal. "I didn't spend much time doing anything else or socialising in any other way."
Jake Gyllenhaal in a scene from the movie Southpaw.
Did it make him miserable? "It's very hard for me to use words like 'miserable' about making a movie when I look out and I see what's happening with the world. It was fun," Gyllenhaal says, grinning. "You get to learn a skill from experts [he was trained by choreographer and former fighter Terry Claybon], their reputation's on the line and they want you to look like a real boxer. So that motivated me. There were times when I was puking, when I went: 'This sucks,' but you know the weird thing about throwing up while you are working out is that if you give yourself like 30 to 45 seconds afterwards, you feel great, you can go again." He punches the air, a gleam in his huge blue eyes. "It's a very odd thing that you'd never expect."
It's obvious he relished the entire experience; Gyllenhaal thrives on adrenalin. A few years ago, he told me he enjoyed nothing more than taking off for long, lone bike rides, "cycling through the redwoods in northern California. If I see someone up a long way ahead I always try and catch him. I definitely have an alpha male aspect to me."
The value of exercise and discipline was instilled early, as a child growing up in LA with his older sister, the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, their screenwriter mother, Naomi Foner, and father Stephen Gyllenhaal, a director.
"He would wake me up and we would go on runs together before school. That was something that we always shared, being physically active outside. My dad would say: 'You'll feel a lot better after you do this.' I remember I didn't want to play football with AYSO [American Youth Soccer Organisation] and he said, 'We're going to do this.' I finally went, and football became my obsession. A lot of times my dad was pushing me into things that I didn't really understand, and then I realised I loved them."
Jake Gyllenhaal in a scene from the movie Southpaw
His home was an intellectually stimulating environment, "like a circus with people coming in and out. Steven Soderbergh [the Oscar-winning director] lived in the room above our garage." Paul Newman was a family friend. Social activism was encouraged; Jake and Maggie did volunteer work with their mother, who took them to homeless shelters.
His altruistic upbringing has also influenced the direction of his career. One of Gyllenhaal's most memorable roles, in Ang Lee's gay cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Oscar nomination and a Bafta, is also one of his most political. "What I think is interesting is how movies can affect some kind of change," he says. "It is beautiful that [gay marriage] is now law," he says, referring to last month's historic US Supreme Court ruling legalising same-sex marriage across the US. "I still think there's a long way to go, but I thought about Brokeback, the fact that it was 10 years ago is amazing ... how far we've come since then."
Gyllenhaal won't discuss his private life, but is said to be single after splitting from model Alyssa Miller last year. The relationship was reportedly a casualty of his Southpaw training schedule, as his trainer Claybon recently admitted: "Jake gave up whatever life he had to live the life of a fighter ... He even broke up with his girlfriend because he was at the ring every day."
Jake Gyllenhaal and Rachel McAdams star in the movie Southpaw.
Gyllenhaal's performances in Southpaw has already led to Oscar talk. Promoting the boxing film at Cannes this year, producer Harvey Weinstein compared his performance to Robert De Niro's in Raging Bull, and predicted that he would be nominated this year after being snubbed in 2014 for Nightcrawler. The actor laughs when I raise the subject. "I think that awards excite the child in all of us, it's intoxicating ... and then you've got to wake up the next day regardless and go back to work. And that's what I love more than anything. It's a miracle when you make a movie and it works. You can't ask for anything more."
Who: Jake Gyllenhaal What: Southpaw When and where: Opens at cinemas Thursday, July 20
