Jake Gyllenhaal pulls his glasses out of his jean jacket pocket, the Coke bottle lenses in them strong enough to correct his 20/1250 vision. Yes, you read that right. These are not Internet Boyfriend glasses, to be styled with a fuzzy cardigan and a rakish smile. These are I Literally Can’t See glasses. Looking through them with normal vision feels like being on some sort of a hallucinogenic.
Gyllenhaal, 43, has been wearing intensive corrective lenses since he was about 6. Born with a lazy eye that naturally resolved, he’s still legally blind. “I like to think it’s advantageous,” he says. “I’ve never known anything else. When I can’t see in the morning, before I put on my glasses, it’s a place where I can be with myself.” He has used his blindness sometimes to help him as an actor — when he was shooting a difficult scene in the 2015 boxing movie Southpaw, one in which police tell his character that his wife has died, Gyllenhaal removed his contacts to force himself to listen more closely.