Jake Gyllenhaal joins Jian to discuss his intense and frightening role in Nightcrawler, a noir thriller about an ambulance-chasing crime photographer. The Oscar-nominated actor plays Lou Bloom, a wild-eyed drifter and petty thief who becomes a freelance cameraman specializing in gruesome footage.
Gyllenhaal reflects on privacy and voyeurism; shares how he got into the head of his sociopathic character; and explains why he’s drawn to challenging and often darker roles.
“I’m not afraid of going into a world like the world of night crawler. I think that it’s enlightening,” he tells Jian. “It’s one of the darker movies that I’ve made, and so to me that’s great light.”
Watch the full 30-minute interview with Jake after the jump, courtesy of CBC Radio.
When Jake Gyllenhaal steals into Toronto under the cover of darkness, he knows he’s always going to find one thing waiting for him: a good night’s rest.
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The pulsating shimmer of Los Angeles at night can seem either like a dreamscape fantasia or a topography of nightmares. In the new film “Nightcrawler” it is both, a land of opportunity and madness and left in some measure for the viewer to unravel.
Jake Gyllenhaal has a razor-thin scar on the palm of his hand. It’s a permanent souvenir from the set of “Nightcrawler,” the Toronto Film Festival thriller, in which the actor plays a twisted crime paparazzo. On the Los Angeles shoot last fall, director Dan Gilroy was filming Gyllenhaal simmering alone in a house after his character, Lou, suffers a professional setback. “We were in the middle of a scene with a mirror,” Gyllenhaal recalls on a recent afternoon. “I hit the mirror.” The violent act wasn’t in the script, and Gyllenhaal still isn’t sure what propelled him to do it. “It was just a choice in that moment that happened,” says Gyllenhaal, who accidentally sliced open his hand on a shard of glass.
