Jake Gyllenhaal is featured on the cover of the July issue of L’Uomo Vogue (Italy) magazine. The spread includes a brand new photoshoot and interview with Jake. Digital scans have been added to the gallery. A behind-the-scenes video has also been added to our video archive, or you can watch it after the jump.
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Magazine Scans > 2019 > L’Uomo Vogue (Italy) | July
Jake Gyllenhaal is punctual for the appointment, calling from his home in New York City. As per his specific request, he kindly but firmly declines to describe his apartment in detail. “I will only tell you that there is a lot of wood and various comfortable chairs. One of those apartments where you want to curl up alone, maybe when you have a high fever. But, in general, it isn’t something I like talking about,” he says, further emphasising his well-known stance on privacy. He has been known to walk away from interviews when journalists have become too aggressive in asking about his tastes or former love interests. Aged 38, he has a view of the world that is earnest and steadfast. He has strong and noble (the Gyllenhaals descend from a family of Swedish aristocrats) ideas about masculinity: “I think being a man means, first and foremost, having an open heart, but, at the same time, a strong mind to protect it.” In New York, the gossip columns talk about his apartment being filled with giant photographs of himself. This began with the New York Post’s Page Six, but he refutes this claim with a loud laugh. “I do like to frame posters from my films. That is true. The rest is ridiculous.” This gallery of important films includes Donnie Darko, Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac and Nightcrawler. His latest sees him take the role of Mysterio in the new Spider-Man: Far from Home, which comes out in Italy on July 10. One can imagine his apartment as being a men’s club fumed with conversation and cigar smoke. Gyllenhaal actually did smoke cigars for a while but without much conviction. “I was good at playing a smoker, all deep thinking and philosophical, and I had even bought a professional humidor that I never used. I also tried pipes for a while, but, in the end, I realised I prefer not smoking at all.” Also because he runs about ten miles a few times a week, with thin-soled shoes that give the impression of running barefoot. He learned about this style of running from the natural athletes in the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico: “Born to Run, which tells their story and their culture of running, is one of my favourite books.” He then discusses various examples of how he’s tried to keep his own life simple, attempting to find a balance between structure and superstructure.
For example, he sold his motorcycle for pretty much the same reason he gave up Havanas and Montecristos. “The motorcycle makes you take on a ‘pose,’ and I already have to pose for my job. I didn’t want that to also be a part of my life.” In general, he doesn’t consider himself to be a super fan or expert in anything, aside from human behaviour, which he observes with a constant curiosity. “I went around with a Moleskine notebook for a while and took notes as a way to look concentrated and cool. Then I tried with voice memos, which I had seen musician friends use.” In the end, he realised his memory was the best way to “cut and paste” mentally, an idea he got from teachings of some of the best gurus in Hollywood. “If you are open and in a creative space, everything that you introject comes to the surface in the moments you need it. These are the teachings of David Lynch and his book Catching the Big Fish. You need to pay attention to the things that connect us to others, via experience and breathing in. This is the secret of the connection between creativity and meditation, at least how I see it.”
This perceptive state of mind is something that Gyllenhaal has cultivated over the years, and it works well with his detached nature which he at- tributes to extreme nearsightedness. From the time he was a child, this kept him separate from the world, which he saw through an incredibly out-of- focus lens. “Without contact lenses, I’m practically blind. This is where the mystery of my weird view of things comes from.
” Even today, he uses little tricks to keep to himself or weed people out, like offering to do the dishes after dinner parties. “It’s an interesting antisocial thing to do. You can avoid boring conversations and be sure that the people truly interested in you seek you out in the kitchen to talk.”
As the son of director Stephen Gyllenhaal and screenwriter Naomi Foner (as well as the younger brother of Maggie Gyllenhaal and brother-in-law of actor Peter Sarsgaard), he grew up among the who’s who of Los Angeles. He loved musicals as a child, and at age 11 he was already on the set of A Dangerous Woman directed by his father. Steven Soderbergh lived in an apartment above the family’s garage before he became famous. When Gyllenhaal was baptised, Paul Newman was selected as his god- father and Jamie Lee Curtis his godmother. And until his parents separated when he was 30, he had not known much pain in his life. But this somewhat easy existence wasn’t wasted on frivolity; he’s too stubbornly self-reflective for that.
“There are no mistakes in life,” he tells himself repeatedly. Not only does this sum up Gyllenhaal’s philosophy, but it is also typical of the somewhat abstract way in which his mind works. He seems not to have any control issues. He’s comfortable with his life and says he’s taken some decisions carefully and others without even thinking, but he followed through with them all the same. He speaks of a pretty stable group of friends, people who all like serious conversation and getting together on Sunday nights for dinners and discourse: politics, the environment, current affairs, art. A selection of educated, upper-class New Yorkers from whom he takes material for his work: the food critic, the chef, the constitutional lawyer, the environmental activist, and, someone really important to him, musician Jeanine Tesori, one of the most acclaimed Broad- way composers. Jake describes her as “an incredible woman who has had and continues to have a great impact on my life.”
He befriended Jaime FitzSimons, a Colorado sheriff who has worked as a police consultant for Hollywood. They’ve worked on films together including End of Watch and Prisoners. This cowboy protected him from an unprovoked attack by a drunk guy outside a restaurant. “I have no idea why he wanted to hit me, maybe to have a good story to tell his friends. But the moral of the story is that it’s nice to have a police officer as a friend when someone wants to hurt you.”
To prepare for End of Watch, he went around some of the worst parts of Los Angeles in the back seat of a police car. He saw a man killed during a drug stop, shot by an officer right before his eyes, and this is something that has affected him greatly. “It was a wake-up call, making me realise what a golden existence I’d lived up to then.” Recently, he has become close to Jeff Bauman, who survived the bombing during the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. He lost his legs. Gyllenhaal played Bauman in the movie Stronger.
Director Sam Mendes has said, “Jake is a man, an artist, with a soul that is accessible.” When he hears these words, Gyllenhaal takes a breath and then brushes them off. “Oh my God. That isn’t true. I’m not that at all.” Actually, the overriding image of him is as a man who is still partially a mystery, who prefers to look more inside than out. “That is true. I’m just like that. I’ve explored the world more by creating my characters than in real life. This is a protected, Shakespearean space, where I’ve always felt safer.”
