Jake Gyllenhaal
At 40 he can be seen again in big big screen hits
Jake Gyllenhaal first appeared in front of the camera when he was eleven.
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Jake Gyllenhaal will be 40 years old on December 19th. After 20 years he is increasingly returning to the genre that made his breakthrough.
Jake Gyllenhaal ("Southpaw") takes on an action role again. After the US actor became part of the Marvel universe as the villain Mysterio in "Spider-Man: Far From Home" in the summer of 2019, he will lead the action thriller "Ambulance" by director Michael Bay (55, "Transformers") in early 2021 the camera. Before that, for a long time it looked as if Gyllenhaal didn't want to know anything about mainstream productions. A look back at the diverse career of the star, who celebrates his 40th birthday on December 19th.
Film debut alongside "City Slicker" Billy Crystal
The son of the director Stephen Gyllenhaal (71, "Waterland") and the screenwriter and producer Naomi Foner (74, "Very Good Girls"), Jacob Benjamin Gyllenhaal grew up in a film family. He stood in front of the camera for the first time at the age of eleven and played the son of Billy Crystal (72) in the comedy "City Slickers – Die Großstadt-Helden" (1991). He landed his first leading role shortly after graduating from high school in Los Angeles. In 1999 the young actor played a rocket designer in the biography "October Sky".
At the turn of the millennium, Gyllenhaal made the decision to devote himself entirely to his acting career and dropped out of a degree at Columbia University in New York that had begun two years earlier. A right decision, because the 20-year-old soon celebrated his first successes. In 2001 he played alongside his sister Maggie Gyllenhaal (43, "Secretary") in "Donnie Darko", a psychologically unstable teenager who communicates in visions with a creature in a rabbit costume named Frank. Although the flick flopped in theaters, it became a hit after its DVD release and is now considered a cult film.
Oscar nomination for "Brokeback Mountain"
Jake Gyllenhaal is not only interested in film, he is also on the theater stage. His debut "This Is Our Youth" in London's West End won him the 2002 Evening Standard Theater Award for "Best Newcomer". He told the Daily Telegraph at the time that every actor he looked up to had worked in the theater and: "That's why I knew I had to try it too." It took a full ten years after that until he took on a theatrical role again in the play "If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet". Gyllenhaal's Broadway debut followed in 2015, most recently in 2019 in the New York production "Sea Wall / A Life".
However, his main business always remained the film. With the blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow" by the German director Roland Emmerich (65, "Independence Day") he achieved his international breakthrough in 2004 as the screen son of Dennis Quaid (66, "Die Reise ins Ich"). A year later, the native Californian reached his career peak to date thanks to the films "Jarhead – Willkommen im Dreck" and "Brokeback Mountain". The supporting role of the homosexual cowboy Jack Twist in the latter work by Ang Lee (66) even brought Gyllenhaal his first – and so far only – nomination for an Oscar. He couldn't win the Academy Award; George Clooney (59) won his first golden boy for his role in "Syriana".
Demanding roles in thrillers and dramas
In the years that followed, the actor devoted himself mainly to sophisticated and unusual subjects. The highlights include the thriller "Zodiac – Die Spur des Killers" (2007) with Robert Downey Jr. (55), "Prisoners" (2013) with Hugh Jackman (52) and "Nightcrawler – Every night has its price" (2014 ), as well as the boxing drama "Southpaw" (2015). In the biopic "Stronger" (2017), the mime also played the American Jeff Bauman in an authentic and sensitive way, who lost both legs in the 2016 bombing of the Boston Marathon.
Despite a lot of critical praise, these roles did not bring Jake Gyllenhaal great success and in 2019 he received a tempting offer. After he missed the leading roles in "Spiderman", "Batman Begins" and "Superman Returns" in the 2000s, he was finally to become a comic book character in "Spider-Man: Far From Home" – albeit one extremely nasty. With the role of the villain Mysterio, who makes life difficult for the spider man (Tom Holland, 24), Gyllenhaal celebrated his return to mainstream film, which he had actually turned his back on after "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" in 2010.
Will he dare to genre in the future?
A direction that he will continue to pursue in the future, as his commitment to "Ambulance" from action specialist Michael Bay proves. Nevertheless, Jake Gyllenhaal will not become a streamlined blockbuster hero, as further new projects are evidence of this. As the producer of "The Guilty" for the streaming service Netflix, for example, he is reissuing a Danish thriller and taking on the leading role. In addition, according to "Deadline", the 40-year-old will play the former head of Paramount Pictures, Robert Evans (1930-2019), in "Francis and the Godfather". The drama outlines the genesis of "The Godfather" (1972).