“I am getting a lot of pressure to play this part,” Jake Gyllenhaal said on stage at Boston Medical Center’s 2016 Boston Marathon pasta dinner on Sunday night. “But I love that pressure. I love this city.”
For nearly a month, the actor has been filming Stronger, a Hollywood feature (not to be confused with Mark Wahlberg’s film Patriots’ Day) based on Boston Marathon bombing survivor Jeff Bauman’s autobiographical book of the same title. Gyllenhaal plays Bauman, a man he called “a triumph in just this unspeakable situation.”
Three people were killed and more than 260 were injured near the Boston Marathon finish line in 2013. Bauman, a Chelmsford native, was among those injured.
Jake Gyllenhaal takes on notoriously tough roles, but his new movie is Boston strong.
Jake Gyllenhaal is known as an actor who goes through incredible physical transformations in order to get into his onscreen roles. For Southpaw last year, he famously trained with boxing pro Terry Clayborn for eight months, doing up to 2,000 crunches a day and packing on 15 pounds of rippled muscles to become Billy “The Great” Hope. Before portraying a nocturnal paparazzo in Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal lost close to 30 pounds by eating mostly kale salads and religiously running 15 miles a day. But for his new film, Demolition, opening in theaters Friday, April 8, the biggest physical transformation he went through was letting his body hair grow out.
