As a stage and screen actor, Jake Gyllenhaal is in the business of making realities from language. His personal theories on acting are like a re-spun version of the linguistic propositions in J. L. Austin’s 1962 book How to Do Things with Words. The British philosopher proposed that language didn’t merely communicate but enacted. A promise, a command, a warning, a declaration (“I now pronounce you man and wife!”)—such performative speech acts, Austin said, didn’t just describe the world but intervened in lived experience. Gyllenhaal, by interpreting the instructions of the script, transmutes the written word into an embodied text. “Acting is an interpretation of somebody else’s text,” he says. “So, if you’ve ever written an essay, it’s about writing an essay with your behavior.”
Movement talks in even his earliest adult roles: As Homer Hickam in biographical drama October Sky (1999), his shuffling gait conveys an earnestness as much as anything he says, and his tortured smirk is among the most memorable elements of his performance as the lead in Donnie Darko (2001).
