I Heart Jake

‘What’s happened to the movies? All those Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy films about love? When I watch Rita Hayworth or Fred Astaire dance I think, why don’t we have that any more?’

‘So many films now are all about sex and love,’ continues Jake Gyllenhaal, fixing me with his intense blue eyes. ‘But you really don’t see the two of them coming together. I want love and sex in movies to be different than it has been.’

This isn’t idle talk. It’s a key element in Gyllenhaal’s new film, which takes as its departure point the prescription drug that never fails to raise a titter, but has changed so many millions of lives that it even has royal approval: it received a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2001.

That drug is Viagra, and the film is Love & Other Drugs. It’s based on the autobiography Hard Sell: The Evolution Of A Viagra Salesman by Jamie Reidy. The book details the author’s experiences working in the cut-throat pharmaceutical industry just as Viagra became the most talked-about pill on the planet. Jamie worked for Pfizer during a period when the company was generating sales of £1 billion a year from its magical new product.

‘I definitely have an alpha-male aspect to me,’ said Jake, who could pass for an athlete

The film is an original, thought-provoking and very funny exploration of love and sex, in which a relationship between Viagra salesman Jamie (Gyllenhaal) and Maggie (Anne Hathaway), an ostensibly confident woman with early-onset Parkinson’s, develops into love.

‘Jamie is the ultimate seducer and would have been perfectly happy to float through life minus the burden of responsibility or connecting to anyone – until he meets Maggie,’ explains Gyllenhaal.

‘There’s not a whole lot of actual sex in the film. There is a lot of us talking with our clothes off, beforehand or after, and I think that’s more real. You don’t have a sheet draped across Annie’s chest, because people don’t tend to do that, do you know what I mean?’ He grins.

‘It’s uncomfortable when you’re naked on set, but I do feel like an old hand at it at this point. I’ve done some pretty crazy things already.

‘My parents taught me to feel comfortable about my body. They told me there’s a beauty in whatever you are. Also I feel it’s very important to portray love and sex in the right way.’

He laughs. ‘Besides, in our case, we’d already had faux movie sex in Brokeback Mountain. So we were relatively comfortable.’

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