Why you'll fall for Jake Gyllenhaal

With roguish good looks and two eagerly anticipated movies, this actor is one you'll be hearing a lot of this Oscar season. Let's just hope the presenter gets his name right: It's Jill-en-hall!
By Frappa Stout

Jake Gyllenhaal is ready to talk. As the actor, 24, braces for two major movies to hit daylight ("Jarhead" and "Brokeback Mountain"), he admits he's got a few things to get off his chest. But don't expect any caddish conquests or regrets hinged on reckless behavior, a job or a girl. Gyllenhaal likes to keep his love life below the media radar. In this guy's war stories, the central theme, the unwitting source of all the angst, is the dinner table.

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It shows up again and again with Gyllenhaal. At the family table in Los Angeles, he watched big sister Maggie (also an actress) rehearse scenes for school plays and marveled at his parents' stories about life on a movie set. His father, Stephen, is a director, and his mother, Naomi Foner, a screenwriter. Show-biz friends such as Jamie Lee Curtis (Gyllenhaal's godmother) and director Anthony Minghella were regular dinner guests, and on certain nights Paul Newman could be found in the kitchen cooking steaks.

The actor grew up surrounded by creative types with "big personalities." His family was loud at the table and never short on opinions. They debated Reaganomics and environmental issues over farmer's-market-fresh food. "We're the closest thing to an Italian family without being Italian," says Gyllenhaal, whose mother is Jewish and father grew up in the Swedenborgian church, a traditional Christian faith from Sweden. "We're all verbose, so it's hard to get a word in edgewise. You have to claw your way around."

Gyllenhaal learned early that in order to get attention, he would have to perform. He started by taking direction from Maggie. "My sister put on this play of Cats while my parents were having a dinner party," he says. "I wanted to be in it, and she said, 'Well, we'll get a bowl of milk and you can lick out of the bowl.' And, no kidding, I sat on the side while they did the whole thing, licking milk." He later went solo, singing Bruce Springsteen tunes and reciting lines from movies such as "Dune" and "Willow" scene for scene while cracking up in his Coke-bottle glasses.

Today, Gyllenhaal finds himself back at the table -- and at the center of attention. But this time, it's at a sidewalk cafe in L.A.'s Miracle Mile section. He comes here often; he lives nearby and likes the food. Gyllenhaal is handsome, but in a boyish way, and he sports funky green trousers and a navy T-shirt, a thin gold chain disappearing under his collar. He has diamond-studded shades (he ditched the glasses for contact lenses in junior high) and an infectious laugh that makes you nostalgic for MTV's Beavis. Except Gyllenhaal is conversant with alternative energy sources and hybrid cars. "In Hollywood," he says, "if you drive a hybrid, you don't have to pay for [meter] parking anywhere."

Gyllenhaal smiles, and despite being 6 feet tall and broad-shouldered, he has an unassuming physical presence, which he used to great effect in films such as last month's "Proof" and 2004's effects-extravaganza "The Day After Tomorrow."

Now, with back-to-back Oscar-caliber movies, the actor with the difficult name is establishing himself as a marquee player who's willing to tackle bold subjects. (Maybe when they read his nominations, they won't trip over his name.) Next Friday, he stars as a third-generation enlistee who becomes an elite Marine sniper in Sam Mendes' "Jarhead." In December, he will appear opposite Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain," a tragic story about two cowboys who meet and fall in love in 1960s Wyoming.

"People will have problems with it," Gyllenhaal says. "But it's kind of hard to disagree with what the movie is saying. It's a story about people struggling with how to love each other."

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Gyllenhaal credits "Jarhead" with setting him on that path. The movie, which is based on Anthony Swofford's best-selling Gulf War memoir (the title is a self-imposed Marine moniker), examines the chilling anguish of soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia during 1991's Operation Desert Storm. Meticulously trained and mentally primed to face the enemy, the Marines mostly just kill time as they wait for the nightmare to begin.

Mendes thought of Gyllenhaal to play Swofford after seeing the actor onstage in London in the 2002 play "This is Our Youth." The two later met at Mendes' apartment, where, at the kitchen table, Gyllenhaal read two emotional scenes. His performance fell flat. Afterward, Mendes served sandwiches and watched Gyllenhaal doggedly fight the urge to go down on his knee and beg to do the audition again. Instead, they small-talked, and the actor went home.

"I think Jake feels like he has been lucky up to this point," Mendes reasons, "and part of him feels undeserving. He thinks he was born into a successful Hollywood family, and it had all just been like falling off a log. He wanted to suffer for his art, and, of course, I put him through it."

Mendes took four months to offer the role to Gyllenhaal, but once he did, he gave the actor plenty of creative leeway. "I just tried to take risks, and Sam allowed it. He made me feel my ideas are intelligent and correct, and now," Gyllenhaal adds wryly, "you can't sway me from that."

Photograph by George Lange for USA WEEKEND
Grooming by Fabiola Arancibia, The Wall Group; styling by Wendy McNett, Oliver Piro