I meet Jake Gyllenhaal in a makeshift production office in an industrial estate outside Boston, Massachusetts. He is bright-eyed and sitting in a bare corner room. He closes the door on his dog, a big Alsatian, which roams outside among a team of assistants staring at screens and eating lunch. He has been here for six weeks making Stronger, a film based on the life of Jeff Bauman, who lost his legs in the Boston Marathon bombing and then identified one of the killers, who he had stood next to in the crowd.
Gyllenhaal, who has a legendary work ethic, is both starring in and producing the film. He’s got to know Bauman well. “The irony is that, however terrible the situation was, it gave him a real meaning and purpose,” he says. “Jeff is quite a character. A hilarious person. The movie is very funny. It is a story of someone who had to learn how to become a father and an adult through an unbelievably difficult and horrific situation. It is a story of how to grow up.”
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.
