I wrote the following piece in 2016 as an attempt to salvage a disastrous roundtable experience opposite Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Jean-Marc Vallée. Despite only being paired opposite one (1) other journalist, I got to ask a single question. You’ll read about it below as I attempt to make some semblance of a story out of the debacle.
I wasn’t sure what to do with it then; I might have pitched it around to no luck. But with Gyllenhaal making the press rounds for AmbuLAnce (I will use the stylized title, thank you), I thought it might be fun to dust this piece off for newsletter subscribers. I have fully no idea what this man is doing with his career right now, but for a few brief moments sharing unnerving eye contact with him, I had a bit of a moment of clarity. FYI: I didn’t do much in the way of editing down a younger and less experienced version of my writing, which I think makes it a little more fun. Hopefully, you can note the growth.
Before sitting down to speak with Jake Gyllenhaal at SXSW, I managed to sneak into a public conversation held between the Oscar-nominated actor and director David Gordon Green (the two would go on to collaborate on the Boston Marathon bombing drama Stronger). The first question fielded from an audience member related to how the actor inhabits such distinct characters as Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler or Billy Hope in Southpaw. Gyllenhaal responded by saying that despite their vast physical and dispositional differences from himself as an actor, a character like the “unhinged” Lou was the closest to him than any other role he played.
I brushed it off at the moment as little more than clever spin to provoke some tweets and gin up some click-baiting headlines. But as I locked eyes with Gyllenhaal hours later to discuss Demolition, I was forced to reconsider. Here was someone so utterly removed from the greasy, smarmy psychopath he played in Nightcrawler. Gyllenhaal looked the part of a comfortable star – a full-framed 35-year-old with longer, more free-flowing hair and a leisurely unbuttoned shirt. Yet after a few seconds of conventional interviewer-subject unbroken eye contact, the actor disappeared and a flash of someone else resurfaced. It was Lou Bloom, if only for a moment.
Of course, the practically non-existent blinking of that character was one of the many ways in which Gyllenhaal visibly distinguished Lou as abnormal from his fellow humans. The chillingly bravura performance seemed to result from a cumulative effect of physical affectations, such as his penetrating stare and silver-tongued rapid dialogue recitation – not to mention a jarring physical transformation that saw Gyllenhaal’s muscular build retreat to such gauntness that his eyes appeared to bulge from the hollowed-out caverns of his face. His work in Nightcrawler is the consummate example of acting as doing. So how, then, does one explain Gyllenhaal’s ability to reproduce the immediacy of the performance when seemingly only performing as himself?
Describing acting can be difficult because we lack a sophisticated vocabulary to capture its essence. As Kent Jones put it last year in Film Comment, “Acting is the Bermuda Triangle of film commentary, written and spoken. There are so many ways of getting around or over or past actually talking about acting in the movies that we take them for granted.” Pinning down the machinations inside an actor’s head that animate a character is to ascribe tangible characteristics to the intangible. Our standard for good acting today might as well fall under the famous test for obscenity – “I know it when I see it.”
In the seemingly most frequent framework for analyzing acting, the best screen acting is the most acting. The source of this heavy valuation of conspicuous effort likely carries over from the theatrical tradition, where thespians must project and perform with strokes broad enough for a patron in the back row of the balcony to discern. On stage, the actor also plays a much greater role in shaping the final product experienced by the audience, whereas the director and any number of technicians intervene into a filmed performance before display.
This primacy of performance on screen received a bit of a restoration in the 1950s with Marlon Brando’s method acting, which trained viewers to observe internal emotions that guided minute physical gestures which were only observable with the intimacy of the camera lens. More recently, the famous practitioner of the extreme technique is Daniel Day-Lewis, whose off-camera preparatory antics have become so infamous one has to wonder if he does it in part for the press notes at this point. Their meticulous approaches to the discipline of acting elevate the performer to auteur status in discourse, a discrete unit guiding the film toward realism and recognition.
Fixating on such markedly visible transformations provides a convenient escape route to discuss acting. Citing these physical or mental alterations as having some bearing on the final performance acknowledges the actor’s dexterity chiefly by honing in on the external manifestation of their characterization. Meanwhile, this does precious little to actually come to grips with what might actually be driving their interpretation. It places the actor’s output on a pedestal above their actual input. Thanks to this tipped scale, Day-Lewis has three Oscars on his mantle.
There is hope, however, that we are turning a corner in our obsession with grandiosity. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar win for The Revenant, in which he played a character whose desperation and struggles hewed all too close to the actor’s own quest for validated respectability, drew strong rebukes from Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com and Sam Adams at IndieWire (among many malcontents). A performer’s physical struggle should inform the narrative of the film first – not the awards campaign.
Back to Jake Gyllenhaal. As he stood in 2016, his status lingers somewhere between the tabloid-infused body metamorphosis obsession of DiCaprio and the highbrow valuation of Day-Lewis. In just the last half-decade, Gyllenhall bulked up for End of Watch, shrunk back down for the one-two punch of Enemy and Prisoners with director Denis Villeneuve, emaciated himself for Nightcrawler, got ripped to go in the ring for Southpaw and is now back at his normal fighting weight for Demolition and future projects. Save perhaps only Christian Bale, no other prominent actor has yo-yoed to such an extent.
Even so, he would rather us not fixate on the physique for each role or use the phrase “method” to describe his work. Process, time and again, was Gyllenhaal’s word of choice. I asked him if demolition, then, served as an illumination of his approach to creating a character. In Demolition, his Davis Mitchell becomes obsessed with taking things apart (and then ultimately destroying them) in order to understand their value. The act begins as a desperate attempt to feel anything after the death of his wife, which leaves Davis numb to life. Yet demolition also gives way to deconstruction, a realization of how things work gained from analyzing how all its components work together to create meaning.
Gyllenhaal responded that, yes, Demolition could function as a metaphor for his process. “You do have to create something analytically, in your brain first. You have to do a lot of research before you break it down, and you don’t stop using your brain.” But the cerebral origins are only a part of the journey; he added, “For me, in terms of preparation, you do have to build a structure, and you do have to sort of tear it apart.”
On the one hand, Gyllenhaal seems to have internalized the famous “kill your darlings” mantra of William Faulkner. It’s a humbling of himself before the artistic-industrial complex of filmmaking, an admission that the structures he erects for himself only have value when they match the contours of the project. The “one size fits all” philosophy of acting makes a star’s IMDb filmography flow logically but often short changes the films in which their turns are situated. In performances such as Gyllenhaal’s in Demolition, the actor cedes supremacy to the director, allowing his or herself to become the clay for molding.
Our comprehension of screen acting might make this kind of actor seem like less of an auteur or participant in the creative process. What agency does a person have when they are treated like cattle, as Hitchcock famously declared his principal mode of directing actors, or a “glorified extra?” (The latter, Gyllenhaal said, was how David Fincher described his character in Zodiac.) But this type of acting does not limit the performer’s contribution to a film. By embracing the inevitable mediators of their work, it enhances an actor’s collaborative capabilities.
In Demolition, Gyllenhaal allows director Jean-Marc Vallée to act as a co-creator of his performance. Though not credited as an editor on the film, Vallée’s presence in the flow and feel of the film is undeniable. His past three directorial outings (Dallas Buyers Club, Wild, and now Demolition) have evinced a refinement of his impressionistic visual language as the primary purveyor of meaning. Each time, the performances rely less on gimmickry to make their impact. In just four years, he’s progressed from Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto’s stick figure histrionics to Reese Witherspoon’s #nomakeup glamping and, now, Gyllenhaal’s blank slate performing a deeply internalized self-assessment.
The actor recounted Vallée’s instructions before shooting: “I want you to show up and show me what you have.” He took Gyllenhaal at regular size, requesting no flashy alterations to make the character stand out. From there, the director essentially stripped away one of the chief tools actors have to flesh out their character: time. Vallée’s free-flowing, quick-jumping aesthetic constantly disrupts the continuity of Gyllenhaal’s performance, eschewing his power to create an aggregate effect. Demolition relies purely on his presence in any given moment, which is a different kind of work than Gyllenhaal normally does. The method did not matter as much as the process since, as he put it, “There’s not much preparation. In fact, he [Vallée] took me out of my comfort zone of preparation and creating the specificity of the character.”
We spend so much time looking for how actors do that we overlook the ways they just are. This is, by nature, a quality both subjective and open to argumentation. But we do this alchemy a disservice when we try to assign it the properties of science – or, worse, let it go unnoticed and undiscussed. Actors with the gift of successfully selling grandiloquence deserve better than to have their less flashy, more participatory performances written off as “minor key.”
Films (at least the good ones) are not made by separate craftsmen laboring as discrete units. They arise from the symbiosis of on- and off-screen talent, above- and below-the-line artisans.
The sooner we shed romantic ideals about the solitary actor enduring physical or mental duress to create a character, the easier it will become to develop a more sophisticated language to pin down the presence of an actor. Hard as it might be to readjust our moorings, perhaps our litmus test for good acting needs a shift from knowing it when we see it to knowing it when we feel it.
If you feel so inclined after reading this, Demolition is available to rent through various digital services. But mostly, I hope this is a lens you can use to better understand or appreciate Gyllenhaal’s work at large.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall