Jake Gyllenhaal could do absolutely anything next. Asked over lunch about his reading of a famed line in “Othello” — Iago’s seething “I hate the Moor” — the 44-year-old actor furrows his brow, runs his hands through his buzzed hair and ponders the performance I attended. “I’m trying to think about yesterday’s matinee, because it changes,” he says. “I’ve not made any sort of definitive choice.”

Soft-spoken and gently smiling, Gyllenhaal later summons the wide-eyed mania of his zanier characters — think his drunken “Okja” zoologist or Mr. Music of “John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch” — when the topic shifts to his eclectic body of work. “I’m just kind of random,” the Oscar nominee exclaims. “I guess as focused and intense as I can be, I also have a sense of, like, ‘That sounds fun. Oh, that scares me — I’ll give that a shot.’”

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Jake stopped by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night to promote ‘Othello’. Follow the link to watch the interview, or download the videos in our media section. Screen captures are in the gallery.

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We’re talking about faith. Last December, just before Christmas, actor Denzel Washington was baptized and licensed as a minister, and so it hasn’t taken long, chatting about his return to Broadway playing the title role in Othello, for conversation to turn to matters of belief. Not religious, per se; Shakespeare’s great tragedy turns on themes of love and jealousy and betrayal. Perhaps, Othello’s choice to trust the evidence of his eyes—a planted handkerchief—over his innocent wife Desdemona’s protests that she has never strayed, is a kind of loss of faith, a misguided embrace of rationality over spirit.

“Well, sure, he wants proof,” pipes up Jake Gyllenhaal, who co-stars in the production as Iago, planter of the aforementioned handkerchief, “and, Iago keeps leading him back to the handkerchief—look, look!—but the only reason he can manipulate Othello that way is that they have a bond. They’ve fought together, trusted each other with their lives. He knows this is a man with a great sense of faith and love.”

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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.”

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Jake Gyllenhaal pulls his glasses out of his jean jacket pocket, the Coke bottle lenses in them strong enough to correct his 20/1250 vision. Yes, you read that right. These are not Internet Boyfriend glasses, to be styled with a fuzzy cardigan and a rakish smile. These are I Literally Can’t See glasses. Looking through them with normal vision feels like being on some sort of a hallucinogenic.

Gyllenhaal, 43, has been wearing intensive corrective lenses since he was about 6. Born with a lazy eye that naturally resolved, he’s still legally blind. “I like to think it’s advantageous,” he says. “I’ve never known anything else. When I can’t see in the morning, before I put on my glasses, it’s a place where I can be with myself.” He has used his blindness sometimes to help him as an actor — when he was shooting a difficult scene in the 2015 boxing movie Southpaw, one in which police tell his character that his wife has died, Gyllenhaal removed his contacts to force himself to listen more closely.

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