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.”
“I am getting a lot of pressure to play this part,” Jake Gyllenhaal said on stage at Boston Medical Center’s 2016 Boston Marathon pasta dinner on Sunday night. “But I love that pressure. I love this city.”
