This item has been in the gossip news all day today, so I suppose I would be remiss not to cover it, but I find it one for the “well YEAH..duh!” column.
Apparently Jake Gyllenhaal is out and about promoting his latest film, Demolition. I have yet to see a trailer for this film yet, but from everything I’ve read and seen on television, the reports are good and it looks compelling. Gyllenhaal is certainly an accomplished actor, and usually doesn’t disappoint.
According to The Internet, Gyllenhaal was doing the usual press junket for the film when out of the blue, a reporter from People Magazine brought-up one of his former co-stars, Jennifer Aniston. As you may remember, Aniston and Gyllenhaal starred in The Good Girl together when Gyllenhaal was only 22 years old (he’s 35 now). Apparently, the experience made quite an impression on him.
I will say, I had a crush on her for years. And working with her was not easy. I was – um, yeah. That’s all I’m going to say. It was lovely. It wasn’t hard, that’s what I would say
While a lot of media outlets are taking this answer to mean that there may have “been something” between the actors, I think that’s reading far too much into the situation. The Good Girl (which was a terrific movie, by the way; both actors were sublime in it) came out in 2002, and that would have been smack in the middle of when Aniston was married to Brad Pitt…the pre-Angelina days.
As for Gyllenhaal’s admission that he had a crush on Aniston for years (and it sounds like he still does), by my estimation, that would make him exactly like every single other male human of the species that resides on this planet. Is this news cute? Yes. But earth-shattering? Hardly.
Naturally, as any gossip and entertainment journalist worth his or her salt would do, the reporter form People took it a step further and tried to get Gyllenhaal to open-up a bit more about the crush, asking him what it was that so drew him to her in the first place, and even intimating that perhaps it was watching “Friends” that piqued his crush.
Not so much Friends, but kind of her personality from afar, and movies she was in. he said. I’m not a huge Friends fan, but a fan of who she is
Well now. That’s a complement if I’ve ever heard one.
Historically, Gyllenhaal is notoriously closed-lipped when it comes to revealing too much (or anything) about his personal life to the press, despite the fact that he has dated some of Hollywood’s most prominent starlets. However, this interview is not the first where he has opened-up a bot more than he has in the past. Recently, the actor was on the Howard Stern Show, and divulged on the air that he someday hoped to get married – not exactly groundbreaking stuff, but in the context of Stern’s incessant grilling of the actor about his high-profile past romances, it seems significant.
At least part of this change in Gyllenhaal (in addition to just being older and wiser), may be an after-effect of the death of his co-star and good friend, Health Ledger, who he starred with in Brokeback Mountain (which, if you haven’t seen it yet, what are you waiting for !? It’s fabulous). During his interview with People, he also touched on the ways in which Ledger’s death brought him back to earth, and made him want to feel more connected to the people in his life.
Personally, it affected me in ways I can’t necessarily put in words or even would want to talk about publicly. In terms of professionally, I think I was at an age where mortality was not always clear to me.
I think you live in this bubble, too, of making films. There are real friends, and there is a real community. There is also that new Macklemore song where he says ‘The curtain closes and nobody notices’ . I think that’s true, and I think that’s okay. But I think at the time, I assumed everyone would notice – and they did with Heath dying, but I think it gave me the experience of, ‘This is fleeting”, and none of the attention or synthesized love that comes from the success of a film really matters at all. What matters is the relationships you make when you make a film, and the people you learn from when you’re preparing for a film. That changed a lot for me
So perhaps we might be hearing more from the new, improved Jake Gyllenhaal in the very near future. This Jennifer Aniston thing may just be the tip of the iceberg in what may very well become a peek inside the mind of one of Hollywood’s most underrated actors.
Goodness, I certainly hope so.
