Jake Gyllenhaal could do absolutely anything next. Asked over lunch about his reading of a famed line in “Othello” — Iago’s seething “I hate the Moor” — the 44-year-old actor furrows his brow, runs his hands through his buzzed hair and ponders the performance I attended. “I’m trying to think about yesterday’s matinee, because it changes,” he says. “I’ve not made any sort of definitive choice.”
Soft-spoken and gently smiling, Gyllenhaal later summons the wide-eyed mania of his zanier characters — think his drunken “Okja” zoologist or Mr. Music of “John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch” — when the topic shifts to his eclectic body of work. “I’m just kind of random,” the Oscar nominee exclaims. “I guess as focused and intense as I can be, I also have a sense of, like, ‘That sounds fun. Oh, that scares me — I’ll give that a shot.’”
First there was method acting (sometimes it wins you an Emmy, sometimes it bristles your costars, sometimes it does both). Then a novel phenomenon called method dressing took red carpets by storm (remember Zendaya’s perfectly executed tennis-themed looks for her Challengers press tour?) Next up: The method dressing room.
We’re talking about faith. Last December, just before Christmas, actor Denzel Washington was baptized and licensed as a minister, and so it hasn’t taken long, chatting about his return to Broadway playing the title role in Othello, for conversation to turn to matters of belief. Not religious, per se; Shakespeare’s great tragedy turns on themes of love and jealousy and betrayal. Perhaps, Othello’s choice to trust the evidence of his eyes—a planted handkerchief—over his innocent wife Desdemona’s protests that she has never strayed, is a kind of loss of faith, a misguided embrace of rationality over spirit. 
