For a while last year, Jake Gyllenhaal was everywhere and the issues demanding his commentary were numerous: there was the war in Iraq, which he took on when Jarhead, set in the first Gulf war, was launched; there was the meaning of genius (via Proof); homophobia in rural America (Brokeback Mountain); and — harking back to his role in the 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow — that hardy perennial of the politically engaged actor, global warming. When Gyllenhaal wasn't addressing the major issues of the day, his sister, Maggie, was giving it all she had on the state of the world post-9/11, thanks to her appearance in the film World Trade Center. Some days it felt as if there simply weren't enough issues out there to keep the Gyllenhaal siblings in serviceable opinions.
Theirs is a classic liberal Hollywood family: father, Stephen, a director, mother, Naomi, a screenwriter, and two children who started acting in their school days. Gyllenhaal's first professional role was at the age of 10, playing Billy Crystal's son in City Slickers, and after that his parents had him turn down lots of roles so that he could concentrate on his school work. At 19, he took his first lead, in a film called October Sky — "The true story of a coal miner's son who was inspired by the first Sputnik launch to take up rocketry, against his father's wishes" — and since then he has become the go-to guy for any film requiring brooding sensitivity with just enough geekiness to inject a bit of comedy. Gyllenhaal is in London to present an award at the Baftas, having won one himself last year. He is also promoting a new film, Zodiac, a straightforward serial-killer flick, co-starring Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. It's based on a memoir by Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s, who took it upon himself to investigate a serial killer who was terrorizing the city under the pseudonym the Zodiac. Graysmith became so obsessed by the case that he took on shadow characteristics of the killer himself, so much so that Gyllenhaal was nervous about meeting him. "It wasn't the cosiest idea," he says. "What sort of guy 'gets into' a serial killer?"
The result is an enjoyable cop film, and the three male leads, including Downey Jr as the twitching, alcoholic chief crime reporter, are a pleasure to watch. I assume Gyllenhaal was glad to get off the issue-laden conveyor belt of his previous few films, but, he says, "Strangely, I like talking about all that." Politics was always a part of the household he grew up in and today Gyllenhaal reads the domestic and foreign papers online and is an obsessive keeper of pieces from the New York Times. His studenty earnestness is undercut, here and there, by a dim awareness that people don't like being lectured by actors, and he'll round off a speech against the war in Iraq with a little what-do-I-know shrug. He is passionate and well-informed and in 10 years' time he could be George Clooney; then again, he could be Sean Penn.
At 27 he is still as serious-minded as a teenager, determined to root out the underlying issues in all things. "Well, I actually believe that this film [Zodiac] is — you're probably going to look at me like I'm a madman — but I think it's about the advent of the cellphone. It would be a 25-minute movie if there were cellphones in the 70s. Because all the things that go wrong, if there had been a means of communication on your person that had been as quick as text message or a phone call, I think they could've solved this. This movie is a lot about the lack of technology."
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