Look closely at the poster for the Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway Viagra-and-Parkinson’s comedy Love and Other Drugs. Apparently, director Edward Zwick was actually naked and in the shot with his stars, but got Photoshopped out. At least that’s what we heard at Zwick and Gyllenhaal’s recent New Yorker Festival Q&A with Anthony Lane. According to Zwick, Gyllenhaal and Hathaway had been complaining about how often he’d forced them to do nude scenes. “I said, ‘What do you want me to do?'” said Zwick. “And they said, ‘You take your clothes off.’ And I said, ‘Fine!'” Said Gyllenhaal: “It’s weird how eager you were, too. He was like, ‘That’s it? No problem!’ And then it was off. It terrified me! Like, all of a sudden, this really intimate relationship became way, way weird.” Then, says Zwick, all three of them snapped a naked photo together. “The art director looked at it and said, ‘Get rid of the director,’ and he stripped me out and put Annie’s head on Jake’s shoulder, and that’s the movie poster.”

Also, we learned a few other fun facts about Gyllenhaal:

• He’s masturbated “four or five times in four or five different movies.” In The Good Girl, he said, “I decided my character was going to masturbate with his left hand. That was my character choice.”

• His early acting career mostly consisted of sitting in the background while his older sister Maggie sang and danced for dinner guests. “I did everything wrong, according to her. So I was always banished to the corner,” he said. “Les Mis, when she put that on, I was just a poor person sitting in the corner, begging for money, and she sang and danced all the songs. It’s never changed. It’s still like that to this day.”

• He filmed Donnie Darko when he was having a hard time in college and didn’t know where he was going in life. (He dropped out.) After it screened at Sundance, he said, “My mother and father and sister came up to me afterwards, crying, sort of realizing that I had been trying to say something to them about how lost I was. Something about talking to that rabbit at the time comforted me.”

• He accidentally offended the entire crew of Brokeback Mountain when he showed off his first “bad acting” attempt to play Jack Twist at age 40. “We did the first take and I was doing all this bad acting, like, limping around and my back was achy and I picked up this saddle and I grunted, and half of the crew was 40. They were like, ‘We’re 40. We’re not 80! We do more work than you do, you wimp actor.” Also, looking back on his performance, he really regrets the mustache, though he thinks it helped his acting. “It was hard to eat with that mustache,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s the pain that brings great performances.”

• His dream list of collaborators: Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Gosling, and Michelle Williams, again.

• He said this about Love‘s love scenes: “There’s this weird sense of being watched. If you’ve ever made out with anybody and you know you’re being watched, you can’t help but watch yourself, and that just takes the sexiness out of the whole thing. But we’re performers, so you can make it work. Occasionally I’ve been into it. I won’t talk about with whom.” And then he laughed a lot. But seriously, we need names.

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On September 14th, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time will be released on DVD and Blu-ray. In anticipation of the release,we have a fabulous Q & A with the super hot Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Prince Dastan in the film. He answers questions like – What was your inspiration for the movie? What sort of injuries did you get?. Find out the answers!

QUESTION: You and Gemma Arterton have great chemistry on screen in Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time. That must have helped in the scenes where your characters banter together?
JAKE GYLLENHAAL: Oh definitely! Those scenes I think were the best written and the most fun to play. They came so naturally and we shot them so fast. It was unfortunate that the ended so quickly. We might spend a month on an action scene and half a day on that scene (with Gemma). We would nail it and move on. She and I had a sort of tit for that thing. The first time we met she looked at me as though she was unimpressed and I looked at her like…’You should be! Why aren’t you?’…(joked). So that was it from the beginning, there was no acting required.

QUESTION: The weather in Morocco during filming was supposed to be so hot and sandy that it was almost like having sand in your mouth all the time?
JAKE GYLLENHAAL: It was not that bad. It was ok. It was hot but it was fun. The desert is really cleansing…the sand exfoliates your skin….and there is a nice warm dry sun and you are sweating.

QUESTION: You must have been conditioned by Jarhead?
JAKE GYLLENHAAL: I was. I make a lot of movies about turning back time and a lot of movies in the desert. It’s a very strange thing.

QUESTION: You have been Spider Man and Batman. Now in Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time you have become a sort of super hero?
JAKE GYLLENHAAL: No! I am a video game adaptation. (jokes)

(more…)

Jake Gyllenhaal worked out in a flak jacket before shooting one of his movies, as he wanted to get used to running in a heavy costume.

The actor sports a rippling physique in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and spent hours pumping iron to develop his flat stomach and rippling biceps. Jake knew he had to wear a weighty costume for the role, so decided to don a special outfit whenever he exercised so it didn’t come as too much of a shock.

“I wore a flak jacket to work out and carried an extra 20lbs when I went on a run to simulate the armour, which is very heavy. Whenever I ran I’d also carry something in my hand to get used to running with a sword,” he explained. “It was six months of training. Everything I did was so I could do the same thing on set, not for aesthetics.”

The 29-year-old pushed himself hard for the part, and didn’t stop training even on set. He wanted to shoot as many of the action sequences as possible himself, meaning he didn’t get much free time while making the movie.

“I always want to do as much as I can myself,” he has explained. “And I’m a perfectionist when it comes to fight sequences. I want to get every move perfect and I refuse to accept anything less than that.”

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time will be released on DVD later this month.

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Thanks to @4JakeGyllenhaal for the scan and WDW for translating!

Whether Jake is ever confused with another actor: ‘Yes, Tobey! Perhaps because we both lived, at different times, with the same person [Kirsten Dunst]. Despite some rivalry, we have a lot of respect for each other. I admire his career.’

Jake’s first girlfriend: ‘She found me too talkative and left me very quickly. She wasn’t wrong.’

Is Jake ‘good at pulling’? ‘They wanted to label me as a seducer, but now I think I’ve proved that I’m not like that, and I can’t turn over a new leaf overnight.

At school Jake was more interested in the early history of cinema than in the early history of the earth.
Does Jake ever fall asleep in front of the TV? ‘Yes, and it’s not a good sign. It means I’m alone and I’m depressed, so it’s better that it happens as little as possible.’ In my experience, all men fall asleep in front of the TV – they have a gene for it – and so Jake shouldn’t feel bad that this happens to him.

What’s on Jake’s ‘in front of the TV’ dinner tray? ‘Not much. Definitely a sandwich that I made in a rush, with some chips.’ I think by ‘chips’ Jake doesn’t mean chips, but crisps (hopefully cheese and onion, or barbecue beef).

If Jake were watching TV and one of his movies came on, would he watch it? ‘That’s very rare. It would have to be because I have an excellent memory of the shoot and because I took that time to heart.’

Does Jake think he’s ugly? Yes he does – very, very ugly. ‘At those times, it’s better to avoid me.’ But, fortunately, less attention is made to appearance these days. ‘We try to grow and be a better person.’

What are Jake’s first thoughts in the morning when he looks in the mirror? ‘Nothing, I can’t even think in the morning. I always feel like I’m in a coma. I take a shower, I try to eat breakfast and I go to work’.

Does Jake have any paparazzi disguises? ‘If you consider a cap a disguise, yes. It doesn’t really cover me but I have an impression of feeling protected.’

Jake’s remedy against stage fright: ‘Sport! Individual or as a team, such as basketball. That’s my only weapon to exhaust all my fears.’

What stresses Jake the most? ‘The holidays at the end of the year. My mother’s Jewish and my father Christian. And all these religious festivals and traditions end up seriously distressing me.’

What prevents Jake from sleeping? ‘Unfinished work. If something prevents me from completing a scene, I find it impossible to sleep’.

Has Jake ever been on a diet? ‘Yes, but for my muscles. For the movie Prince of Persia, I had to put on lots of muscle, so I managed a balanced diet with extra protein.’

What’s the messsage on Jake’s phone? ‘At first, my voicemail said politely: ‘You are through to Jake’s phone, please leave a message after the beep’. I was told that the message was corny and it wasn’t wise to talk about myself but I should be using a prerecorded message. I gave in to the pressure and now people complain because they are never sure that they’re on the right answer phone.’
Jake’s phone tune: ‘A musician friend composed a tune exclusively for my cell phone. I complained that I had the same tune as everyone else. Thanks to him, without doubt, I always know if it’s my phone or not.’