In the penultimate scene of David Fincher’s Zodiac, Robert Graysmith, the newspaper cartoonist turned amateur sleuth played by Jake Gyllenhaal, enters a hardware store in order to get a glimpse of the man he believes may be the most infamous serial killer of his era. He’s trying to remain inconspicuous, but he can’t help staring, and his gaze burns a hole through the screen. “I need to know who he is,” says Graysmith. “I need to stand there, I need to look him in the eye, and I need to know that it’s him.”
Staring is Gyllenhaal’s actorly specialty; in a recent feature in Vulture, Bilge Ebiri writes that the 43-year-old has “the most expressive eyes of any leading man of his generation.” It’s a claim that sticks in Zodiac, which, even before its chillingly ambiguous coda, unfolds subtly and brilliantly as a movie about perspective, a meditation on the art of looking. Gyllenhaal doesn’t really resemble the real-life serial killer hunter Robert Graysmith, but he’s nevertheless perfectly cast as a man trying to catch a glimpse of something elusive. As the film goes along, Fincher carefully sheds his own near-cosmic sense of omniscience so that we see the pileup of evidence—and its implications—through its protagonist’s exhausted, red-rimmed point of view.
Gyllenhaal’s uncanny ability to convey states of perception—from dogged curiosity to awed revelation—is a constant across his best performances. Think of his pavement-pounding detective in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, who surveys crime scenes with a wary, weary sense of professionalism and moral obligation, or the ambulance-chasing videographer in Nightcrawler, whose camera lens becomes a prism through which late-night viewers experience the worst of humanity. This knack is also crucial to the performances that transcend simple categories of good and bad—like his swaggering, imperious art critic in Velvet Buzzsaw, whose name, Morf Vandewalt, suggests a flesh-and-blood New Yorker cartoon. Suffice it to say that Gyllenhaal is not an under-actor: Depending on the situation, he’s willing to push physical and verbal gestures past the point of exaggeration and go spiraling over the top. Even when he doesn’t stick the landing—like as a delirious television presenter in Bong Joon-ho’s Okja—there’s an excitement in watching his talent go splat all over the material. Such reckless confidence is rare in A-listers, and it helps to explain why Gyllenhaal is drawn to both musical theater (the clip of his performance of “Suddenly, Seymour” from Little Shop of Horrors opposite O.G. Audrey Ellen Greene is wonderfully endearing) and self-parody (his cameo as “Mr. Music” in John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch is theater-kid-of-the-damned stuff).
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With all of this in mind, the news that Gyllenhaal would be starring in a remake of the deathless 1989 thriller Road House—the one where Patrick Swayze is an indestructible bouncer who breaks hearts and rips throats in Jasper, Missouri—came with a queasy sort of excitement. Road House is a canonical Bad Movie—one capacious enough that critic Sean T. Collins was able to compile a book-length exegesis of its contents titled Pain Don’t Hurt. A modern version directed by a sly operator like Doug Liman possesses the potential for satire and homage; meanwhile, turning the protagonist, Dalton, into an ex-UFC fighter who’s paid to crack skulls in the Florida Keys is potentially so intense that Gyllenhaal’s eyes might pop out of their sockets once and for all.
Based on the trailer for Road House 2.0, nobody will be looking at Gyllenhaal’s eyes when the movie hits Prime Video later this month. The focus will be on his body, which looks even more ripped than it did in 2015, when Gyllenhaal played a championship-level boxer in Southpaw. He got a lot of press for hitting the speed bag then, yet Gyllenhaal has also rejected the idea of body-shaping as a shortcut to authenticity. “I don’t think transforming your body physically has anything to do with the craft of acting,” he told The Guardian in 2017 while promoting the sci-fi horror movie Life. Gyllenhaal has a history of saying strange things while promoting his movies, from describing his love scene with Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl as “torture” to (sarcastically) claiming he’d stopped taking showers when The Guilty came out. He’s also known for guarding his private life: A 2022 Esquire profile opens by inventorying the actor’s demurrals to get personal, describing him as a man “who once answered a question about what he’d had for breakfast with ‘There are some things I keep to myself.’” Depending on the situation, Gyllenhaal’s dead-eyed deadpan during press tours can be deeply funny—like when he disingenuously corrected Velvet Buzzsaw director Dan Gilroy’s absurd (and Megamind-inspired) mispronunciation of “melancholy.” There’s also something to be said for his willingness to be silent, like when he didn’t criticize the 10-minute video for Taylor Swift’s rerecording of “All Too Well,” which featured his doppelgänger and briefly reignited Swifties’ all-encompassing ire toward him. “It has nothing to do with me,” Gyllenhaal said when asked about the song. “It’s about her relationship with her fans. It is her expression. Artists tap into personal experiences for inspiration, and I don’t begrudge anyone that.”
If that sounds unusually well adjusted for an actor who supposedly sabotaged a French film production by reading the script in a Pepé Le Pew accent and dived into freezing Icelandic waters claiming, “When I see the sea, I swim in the sea,” it may be best to conclude that Gyllenhaal contains multitudes. His ability to channel mercurial extremes has served him well, acting-wise, dating back to 2001’s Donnie Darko, when his reputation did not precede him; instead, writer-director Richard Kelly doubled down on the 19-year-old actor’s almost preternatural sense of vulnerability. A heady, uncategorizable mix of precisely observed adolescent angst and anxiously apocalyptic science fiction threaded deftly through Reaganite satire, Donnie Darko was one of the strangest American indies of the 2000s, and it wouldn’t have worked without Gyllenhaal’s dynamic range in the title role. In Vulture, the actor talked about trying to hide from the camera even during close-ups and said that his solution to his shyness—carrying himself with his head down and his eyes tilted up—unlocked the moroseness and isolation of the title character, who believes the world is about to end and is trying to figure out his role in a larger cosmic mystery. At times, it’s as if Donnie—who’s prone to sleepwalking and nightmarish visions—is hallucinating the movie around him, but Gyllenhaal also has moments of wonderful, sarcastic lucidity, like lashing out at a callow motivational speaker (Patrick Swayze, coincidentally) whom he deems “the fucking Antichrist.”
After narrowly missing out on two potentially career-changing (or career-stalling) superhero roles in Spider-Man 2 (where Sam Raimi imagined him as a potential replacement for an ailing Tobey Maguire) and Batman Begins, Gyllenhaal scored his first Oscar nomination for Brokeback Mountain, whose narrative of romantically entwined cowboys positioned it at the center of a high-profile culture war. Acting opposite a brilliant Heath Ledger, Gyllenhaal showed a mix of desire and reticence that was powerful and persuasive; when grilled about his own sexuality in interviews, he called rumors that he was bisexual “flattering” and talked about his need as an actor to “embrace” discomfort. The next few years would bring some good performances—especially in Zodiac, which forced Gyllenhaal to hold his own with a white-hot Robert Downey Jr.—but it wasn’t until he paired up with French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve on a pair of thrillers released in 2013 that he found a filmmaker who really knew how to channel his talents.
Viewed again a decade after its controversial release—and in the shadow of its director’s ascent to Spielbergian levels of success and creative control—Prisoners remains a beautifully made and weirdly craven piece of studio product: a movie about the ethics of violence and torture that tries to have its humanism and beat the shit out of it too. What keeps it from being complete prestige trash, however, is the delicacy of some of the acting, including from Gyllenhaal, who injects a potentially standard-issue crusading cop with just enough spiritual ambiguity that he could almost be a suspect in his own case. To return to Gyllenhaal’s use of his eyes, he gives Detective Loki the memorable mannerism of excessive blinking—a symptom, he explained, of the character’s psychic overload. He’s even better, though, in Enemy, which lets him play out every actor’s dream of a dual role; the enigma of the movie—based on José Saramago’s acclaimed novel The Double—is whether the physically identical Torontonians Adam Bell and Anthony Claire are actually two different men or just fragments of some shared psyche. The scenes where Gyllenhaal plays off of himself are so brilliantly edited and executed as to feel genuinely uncanny; in a movie that wears its local Cronenbergian allusions on its sleeve, the actor evokes no less than Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers.
If Villeneuve is Gyllenhaal’s best collaborator to date, Tony Gilroy is a close second: Nightcrawler in particular scores as a rancid, hilarious riff on the media-themed cautionary tales of the ’70s. “I’d like to think that if you’re seeing me, you’re having the worst day of your life,” jokes Gyllenhaal’s man-bunned Louis Bloom, who’s willed himself into a one-man cottage industry in the field of crime scene reportage and whose malevolence reveals itself in increments, hidden behind well-practiced politesse. It’s exactly how a smart loner might try to talk to other people, and Nightcrawler works best as a character study of somebody without any character. The deeper it plunges into Lou’s aspirations and methodology, the hollower he becomes—a condition exacerbated by the actor’s pale, skeletal appearance. In the creepiest scene, Lou manipulates a local news director (Rene Russo) into meeting his price for freelance hell-raising—the tonal shift from itchy beta-male frustration into smug confidence is monstrously entertaining.
In 2019, the superhero-industrial complex ensnared Gyllenhaal for Spider-Man: Far From Home, and he’s perfectly enjoyable as the duplicitous, illusion-spinning supervillain Mysterio, a fan favorite embodying contemporary anxieties about fake news. (His version of the character, who’s all about manipulating the media to prove a point, would probably get along nicely with Lou Bloom.) 2021’s The Guilty gave him another obsessed detective role, encased within a single-location gimmick that did no favors for his teeth-gnashing acting. Trapped in a call center behind a keyboard, Gyllenhaal seemed to be bridling against the conceit, but he triumphed behind the wheel in Michael Bay’s underrated Ambulance as a ruthless—but essentially sympathetic—bank robber leading police on a desperate chase through downtown Los Angeles. A chaotic joyride of a movie directed with technocratic flair, Ambulance wouldn’t seem to be an actor’s showcase, but Gyllenhaal—perhaps liberated by the knowledge that he was working with one of the most famously brash directors of all time—took the opportunity to let it rip, a virtuoso hijacking his own star vehicle.
Whether Road House can match—or surpass—Ambulance’s exultant carnage remains to be seen. Certainly, the prospect that Gyllenhaal will throw hands with Conor McGregor as a rival henchman has the potential to enliven a moribund spring movie landscape. Of course, Road House won’t actually be playing in theaters—much to Liman’s consternation. In January, the director wrote a scathing op-ed for Deadline in which he explained his plans to boycott his own film’s March 8 premiere at South by Southwest after Amazon decided to push it directly to streaming. “If we don’t put tentpole movies in movie theaters, there won’t be movie theaters in the future,” Liman wrote, adding that Amazon’s strategy undermined Gyllenhaal’s work in the lead role. “[It] deprive[s] Jake Gyllenhaal—who gives a career-best performance—the opportunity to be recognized come award season. … This could be industry shaping for decades to come.”
In an interesting—and, in a way, predictable—twist, Gyllenhaal has weighed in, and he seems to be siding with Amazon. “I adore Doug’s tenacity,” he told Total Film. “But, I mean, Amazon was always clear that it was streaming. I just want as many people to see it as possible.” As ever, Gyllenhaal is calling things as he sees them. And when he’s involved, the eye of the beholder is an interesting place to be.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.
