How serious is Jake Gyllenhaal about acting? Well, the 35-year-old actor and Oscar nominee (for Brokeback Mountain) spent five months in the back of a police car, on ride-alongs with the Los Angeles police to get in character for the 2012 cop film End of Watch. He lost 40lb by eating nothing but kale salads and running 15 miles a day for six months to play a skeletal video journalist in 2014’s Nightcrawler.
He trained so hard for last year’s boxing movie Southpaw, working out six hours a day for five months (including 2,000 sit-ups a day), that he decided his girlfriend at the time, the model Alyssa Miller, was getting in the way, so he dumped her, preferring instead to focus . . .
“No, no, no! That is just not true!” Gyllenhaal interrupts, half-giggling with embarrassment. “Look, I love my work, but my life comes first. I was intensely focused when preparing for that movie, yes. But, no. Haha. No.”
