I pick up Jake Gyllenhaal in Lower Manhattan, not outside his building, a redbrick factory converted into luxury condos designed for discretion, but instead at a hotel taxi stand three blocks south. We set out for Monticello Motor Club, a members-only racetrack in the southern Catskill Mountains, two hours north, in my beat-up Jeep.
He volunteers to take the wheel—“I’m a good driver, you’ll see!”—then to navigate, and he sounds a little aggrieved when he’s upstaged by Waze. “I want to be a good copilot here,” he says as we creep toward the Lincoln Tunnel. The traffic is bad, but he doesn’t complain. He’s been looking forward to leaving town, away from the endless obligations and the hounding tabloids. This day is work, too, of course, but at least it will be offset by adrenaline-inducing fun. His incoming calls go ignored, his texts unread. As we climb the New Jersey Palisades, and the city passes from view, his shoulders seem to slacken under his comically puffy coat. He rifles through his backpack and pulls out an energy bar. “I brought this for you,” he says. “I’ve got a bag of nuts, if you want to share them later.” He’s really into food.
Jake Gyllenhaal is attached to star in and produce Cut & Run, a heist thriller from Brian Oliver and Bradley Fischer’s New Republic.
When the Danish film The Guilty premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, much of the audience exited the screening in a state of adrenaline overload or distress. Jake Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, felt inspired: He couldn’t help but wonder what an American version would look like, and he soon took it upon himself to find out. The end result, shot over the course of just 11 days, stars Gyllenhaal as a cop who’s on desk duty as a 911 operator when a frantic woman (played by Riley Keough) calls in to report that she’s been abducted. Then, she promptly hangs up. For W’s annual Best Performances issue, Gyllenhaal shares why he was so compelled to adapt The Guilty and recalls an entirely different anxiety-inducing experience: his early on-set encounter with Brad Pitt.
Universal Pictures is officially delaying Michael Bay’s Ambulance movie release date two months from February 18 to April 8, 2022. Based on the 2005 Danish film of the same name, the action thriller centers on war veteran William Sharp as he reaches out to his adoptive criminal brother Danny for help to get $231,000 to pay for his wife’s surgery. The two head out for a $32 million bank heist, though when things go wrong and a Los Angeles Police officer is shot, they hijack an ambulance with an EMT and the dying officer as their hostages and race to find a way to escape the law.
