A bulked-up Jake Gyllenhaal has moved from dark, edgy roles to big budget action adventure in “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time“, a movie that could succeed the hit “Pirates” franchise as Disney’s next big thing.

While the 29-year-old, Oscar-nominated actor is being typically coy about future plans, Gyllenhaal said in an interview that he was ready to return to the role of a swashbuckling 6th century Persian prince.

Prince of Persia, based on the popular video game which first appeared in 1989, premieres in London on Sunday and hits theatres in late May.

“Of course, if there’s an opportunity to do another one and people respond to it,” Gyllenhaal told Reuters in an interview to promote the movie, when asked if he envisaged the film as part of a series.

“I don’t think that’s really on our mind. I think our mind is to get this one out. But of course, it would be an honour. If an audience asks for a sequel, then that’s an honour,” added the actor, who trained hard for demanding stunt and fight sequences.

The three “Pirates of the Caribbean” films to date, starring Johnny Depp, are a hard act to follow, having grossed $2.7 billion at the global box office.

Industry followers see an additional challenge in that big-screen adaptations of video games have struggled to meet expectations. Estimates of Prince of Persia’s production budget range from $150-200 million.

Gyllenhaal is braced for a rough ride from followers of the Prince of Persia game series, which he played as a young boy.

“I know … this will not appease all gamers, and I know there is a lot of scepticism about the translation of a video game to a movie, but I also feel excited that I think we’ve done something that’s better than any of the translations that have come out thus far.

“These games haven’t been given the respect they deserve in the movie world and I think (producer) Jerry (Bruckheimer) has done that and I think that we tried so hard to make it our own and at the same time stay true to the games.

“They (gamers) are tough, and I appreciate that. I come from a tough family. I don’t mind tough critics.”

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Gyllenhaal cut his acting teeth as a troubled outsider in smaller-budget movies which won him critical acclaim.

“Donnie Darko” (2001) is considered by some to be his breakthrough, while “Brokeback Mountain” earned him his sole Academy Award nomination and a BAFTA award in Britain.

He was linked with several action hero parts in the past, notably Spider-Man and Batman films, but it was Prince of Persia which finally brought him into the Hollywood mainstream.

“I think it was about time I stopped taking myself so seriously,” the actor said, when asked why he had followed the likes of Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey Jr. into action movies.

“When I was a little younger, and I did start (acting) so young, I think you tend to try and be a little bit more of what you think other people might want or what people might consider to be interesting.

“And then I think I found that I’ve just decided to do what I find interesting. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to do films that are darker later on,” he added.

In Prince of Persia Gyllenhaal plays Dastan, a boy adopted by King Sharaman who becomes embroiled in a quest to protect a magic dagger that can access the legendary Sands of Time, capable of turning back time.

Directed by Mike Newell and starring Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina and Gemma Arterton, the movie features battles, chases, plenty of special effects and light-hearted dialogue.

Gyllenhaal said he looked back far into Hollywood history for inspiration.

“I like to think of this as a little bit more Errol Flynn in a way, I’ve always thought of it that way and I was always inspired by him in this movie.”

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Posting a really great interview below from 30Ninjas:

The other night, as I was sitting in my darkening office, Jake Gyllenhaal called. Even though the call was “scheduled,” I didn’t really expect this artist-turning-action-hero to have the time to talk to me since he was about to leave for a global press tour. I was convinced I was going to be rescheduled. I have never been so glad to be wrong because he was everything I expected: smart, articulate, and charming. Nonetheless, there was something that took me by surprise: how much he laughed at himself. For all his accomplishments and over-the-top talent, this is not a guy who takes himself too seriously. I think that’s a good omen for his next film, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, because for me, anyway, self-seriousness is the death knell for an action film. I go to an action movie to channel my inner thirteen-year-old old boy, not ponder the meaning of life.

Of all the popcorn summer blockbusters, Prince of Persia has got me the most intrigued. It should be terrible, shouldn’t it? It’s based on a video game, so how could it possibly be good? But whenever I look at the trailer, there are lines that make me laugh, the production values look good, and it’s directed Mike Newell, the man who brought you (among many other films) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Donnie Brasco (an underappreciated mob classic, in my book). Plus, of course, there’s Jake Gyllenhaal, strapped in leather, with two long swords down his back, freshly trained by parkour legend David Belle to leap from building to building. What’s not to like?

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With roles in indie or edgy fare like “Brokeback Mountain,” “Jarhead,” “Zodiac” and”Donnie Darko,” Jake Gyllenhaal has not been the sort of actor whose face you see on the side of a Slurpee cup or along the toy aisles of American retail. That is changing this summer, though, with the 29-year-old actor’s title role in “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” which is not only based on a video game, it was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, a master blaster in the popcorn-movie sector.

On a recent trip to the Bay Area to promote the Disney adventure film, Gyllenhaal seem wide-eyed but also amused by his career detour into blockbuster madness. He grinned at more than 4,000 fans who cheered him at a pop-culture expo called WonderCon but also kept an ironic detachment from the scene; during a question-and-answer session a fan asked the actor what moment in history would he visit if he could turn back time  (as his character in the movie can do), and after a pause he answered with a straight face: “I would go back and watch my birth.”

It fit in with his earlier, offstage comment that “Prince of Persia” director Mike Newell might be using the new Lego toys version of Gyllenhaal for X-rated activities in hotel rooms. Clearly, Gyllenhaal is not taking himself or his new movie too seriously, although he gushes about the movie’s dazzle and adrenaline and vintage movie-serial soul.

“I actually jump out of a window and land on the back of my horse, just like in the old movies, Zorro-style,” Gyllenhaal said with the expression of a teenager who just hopped off, like, the best roller coaster ever. It’s no surprise the athletic actor, who was nominated for an Oscar for “Brokeback Mountain,” finds himself going from indie-spirited work into the Comic-Con cinema zone; that’s the template these days after the success of Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr., Christian Bale and Tobey Maguire in massive summer franchises.

“Prince of Persia” is based in the wildly popular video game of the same name and, in winking tone and special-effect emphasis, it might be framed as a landlocked version of Bruckheimer’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, which has plundered $2.7 billion in worldwide box office to date with a strong teen audience. ( “Persia” will be just the fourth PG-13 film in Walt Disney Studios history, joining the three “Pirates” films.) The film was set to be released last summer but, according to producers, it was pushed back due in part to the longer-than-expected timetable of the special effects work.

Gyllenhaal stars as the daring Dastan, a street-urchin-turned-prince who teams up with a fiery princess named Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) to stop an evil ruler (Ben Kingsley) from unleashing a sandstorm that will destroy the world. Along the way, Dastan gets his hands on a powerful weapon that can wind back time.

Gyllenhaal says he “over-prepared, wildly” for the sword-fighting, horse-riding, fist-fighting, rope-climbing, etc., needed for the job and treated the whole experience like some rollicking ride through a Kipling epic. He said the shooting dates in Morocco and the outsized presence of Newell (“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” “Donnie Brasco“) lent to the sense of safari.

“He’s a big, robust guy, he’s really a general, like how you imagine a D.W. Griffith might carry himself on the set,” Gyllenhaal said. “He would use a bullhorn if you handed him one. He’s got this bellowing, old-school British accent — you hear him from behind the camera, ‘That’s smashing, Jake, smashing. Well done, my boy.’ You’re not living in ‘The Sheltering Sky’ but it’s easy to pretend you were in this old British Empire moment.”

Newell, who has known Gyllenhaal since he was a youngster, said the actor is perfect for the role because he has an aura of effortless charm around him and an almost boyish sense of wonder. “He puts a human heart in the middle of a movie that will absolutely need one to connect with the audience,” Newell said.
Gyllenhaal finished filming “Persia” a year ago and is now off on a different sort of career pursuit (he will appear in two offbeat comedies this year,  David O. Russell’s “Nailed” and Edward Zwick’s “Love and Other Drugs” ) but he says his time in the desert was really just a wardrobe experiment.

“I grew up with filmmakers and I consider myself a filmmaker, sort of, but as an actor taking on a role I know that I’m just a piece of a situation. What I mean by that is you become part of the story that will be up there on the screen and that makes you want to try a really wide variety of situations. You try on a coat, you wear for it a while and you give it back. That’s what acting is. I know this is going to sound simple or maybe even trite, but for a filmmaker there’s a real devotion to the movie — an investment — but sometimes as an actor you just want to try something on.”

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Having interviewed you several times over the years, you seem more at ease with yourself nowadays?
Yes, I do feel that. I think that’s part of growing up. A lot of things happened in my life while I was making this movie, and it made me think that we never know what’s going to happen in the future. All we have is right now, so what do you have to lose but to go for it?

You spent your first day of shooting in a jail?
Yes. People are most open and most vulnerable when they feel it is safe, and it is hard to feel that way in a jail, that’s for sure. It was weird to start the first day of a movie in a jail.

That must have been tough?
It was. I went to LA County Jail and then I went to a couple of juvenile halls which was life changing.

How so?
I think we tend to generalise and to just look at anybody who is in jail a certain way. We don’t look at the story of each person who is in there which is what I think is frustrating. It’s the same as people saying, ‘Is this movie a war story? Is this a story about war?’ I feel you tend to generalise each individual story, what the story is. If someone is a soldier and they are at war, does that mean they are just a soldier at war? Or do they have their own story? And has that story become a war story because they are a soldier? People are coloured by things and that type of prejudice because it’s not what the story about. But in this movie, as in every movie, I found myself learning a different lesson and the biggest lesson I learnt from this movie was from my experience with these boys in juvenile hall.

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