The vital career advice Dustin Hoffman gave Jake Gyllenhaal: “It’s a real testing ground”
Like many Hollywood stars, Jake Gyllenhaal started out young due to family ties to the industry, frequently starring in his father, Stephen Gyllenhaal’s films. When he got older, he began studying at university, but his desire to act was still there, lingering at the back of his mind, leading him to drop out.
Before he knew it, Gyllenhaal had bagged the leading role in a movie called October Sky, starring Laura Dern. However, his breakthrough role as the titular character in Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko sealed the deal. The film saw him play a disturbed teenager tormented by a man wearing a creepy rabbit costume, who leads him away from his house at the beginning of the movie, in turn saving him from a mysterious jet engine crash. The figure tells him the exact dates when the world is set to end, and soon, he begins to increasingly control Donnie’s life, resulting in tragedy.
Gyllenhaal then starred in a string of movies that have since been largely forgotten, like Lovely and Amazing, The Good Girl and Highway. Clearly, the actor was still finding his feet as a relative newcomer in the industry, trying to discover which genres and styles of acting he felt most at home with. From 2004 onwards, he showed significant development, appearing in bigger, more successful movies like The Day After Tomorrow, Jarhead, Zodiac and Brokeback Mountain.
The latter gave him his first Academy Award nomination, becoming a staple of the LGBTQ+ cinema canon as one of the most prominent movies about a homosexual love story to find popularity in the mainstream. As the years have continued, he’s secured more high-profile roles in movies like Prisoners, Nightcrawler, Enemy and Spider-Man: Far From Home, becoming one of Hollywood’s most recognisable stars.
Yet, this progression towards success might not have happened if Gyllenhaal hadn’t tried his hand at theatre, making his stage debut in 2002 in This Is Our Youth at the Garrick Theatre in London. The suggestion to try out theatre was made by Dustin Hoffman, whom Gyllenhaal had worked with that same year in the film Moonlight Mile.
The movie wasn’t the most positively reviewed, but it gave Gyllenhaal a chance to work with a classic Hollywood star, who proved to be full of vital wisdom. Before Hoffman broke into Hollywood with his portrayal of Benjamin in The Graduate, he was active in the theatre, starting out at the Pasadena Playhouse. He appeared on Broadway for the first time in 1961 and subsequently starred in many other plays, picking up awards and grabbing the attention of The Graduate director Mike Nichols.
Talking to the BBC, Gyllenhaal revealed, “I’d just worked with Dustin Hoffman, and he told me I needed to do theatre. He said: ‘You’re pretty good, but you’ve gotta get up on the boards, it’s a real testing ground.’” The actor was grateful for the advice, stating, “The play was really the end of a series of ‘teenager in transition’ roles I had in Donnie Darko, The Good Girl, and Lovely & Amazing. It culminates the end of a period of my life for me.”