INTERVIEW: Jake Gyllenhaal

"Jake Gyllenhaal has always given the impression of a man buoyed by an immense, benign secret. In Donny Darko that secret was a six-foot rabbit who foretold the end of the world. In The Day After Tomorrow, it was the actual end of the world as imagined by German effects wiz Roland Emmerich. In Brokeback Mountain, it was the love that dare not speak its name between two Wyoming cowboys. In Zodiac, it was the identity of the serial killer who terrorised San Francisco during the summers of 1968 and 1969. In Gyllenhaal’s new movie the secret he sits atop is even more closely guarded and fiercely sought-after: how to get Anne Hathaway into bed on a first date. “When I first read the script, I just knew, I gotta get this, I gotta get this one, I gotta get on it, I just loved it,” says Gyllenhaal when I meet him for a beer in the garden of The Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca. Wearing jeans, a check shirt and a month’s growth of beard, he is sat aslouch his chair, his shirt open to reveal a delicate gold chain across his chest, giving off an almost childlike level of self-contentment." — from my interview with Jake Gyllenhaal in Esquire