Hollywood golden boy Jake Gyllenhall made his name playing troubled characters in ‘Jarhead’ and ‘Donnie Darko. His new film, ‘Rendition’, deals with the War on Terror. Nigel Farndale met him.

At 26, Jake Gyllenhaal has become one of the biggest names in Hollywood. As he himself jokes, he has gone, in a short space of time, from having directors say, “Who is Jake Gyllenhaal?” to “Get me Jake Gyllenhaal” to “Get me someone who looks like Jake Gyllenhaal”.

In the past eight years he has starred in 14 films, but the one that put him on the radar was the strange and possibly deep, possibly meaningless, Donnie Darko in 2001. Three years later he had a more conventional box-office hit with The Day After Tomorrow, about the apocalyptic effects of global warming.
But it is on the three films he made in 2005 that his reputation rests: Proof, about a maths genius played by Gwyneth Paltrow; Jarhead, Sam Mendes’s film about marines kicking their heels while waiting for the first Gulf war to start; and Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s lyrical epic about the relationship between two gay cowboys. Gyllenhaal (pronounced Jillen-hall) received an Oscar nomination for that one.

Gravity disguised as lightness of manner: that is what critics have identified as the secret of his mesmerising screen presence. Like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, they say, he knows how to emote without words.

In person his manner seems easy, his voice gentle with dark undercurrents. He is stroking a neatly clipped Edwardian beard that is dark auburn in colour and at odds with the sloppy, crewneck jumper and T-shirt ensemble he is wearing. “I grew it for Brothers, a Jim Sheridan film.” Due for release in 2009, Gyllenhaal stars alongside Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman in the Dublin director’s remake of Susanne Bier’s Danish arthouse film about a young man who comforts his older brother’s wife and children after he goes missing in Afghanistan.

Similarly, his new film, Rendition, is not only thought-provoking and compelling; it also has an ingenious narrative twist which I won’t spoil for you, and which I am not sure I can explain anyway. Gyllenhaal plays a CIA agent who has to oversee the interrogation and torture of a Muslim terrorist suspect — not in America but in the unnamed country to which the suspect has been flown in what is euphemistically known as ‘extraordinary rendition’. The film explores the moral ambiguities of this policy.

“You may be torturing an innocent man,” Gyllenhaal says. “On the other hand you may be torturing a guilty man and the information you elicit from him could save the lives of 5,000 innocent civilians.

“That is the moral dilemma faced by my character in the film. That said, I think for CIA people in those circumstances, moral imperatives do not come into play. They leave that for the philosophers. All they care about is what is working and what isn’t working. Practicality wins over morality. Extraordinary rendition is intended to protect. Sadly, as a policy, it has been over-used and misused.”

Is Gyllenhaal worried he will be viewed as unpatriotic in America?

“If you criticise extraordinary rendition, or Guantanamo, or Abu Ghraib, that doesn’t make you a lefty, that makes you a humanitarian. Personally, I would say extraordinary rendition is not morally ambiguous. It is wrong.”

He adds that he knows how annoying it can be when actors start lecturing people about politics. “I don’t think audiences need to know my political beliefs to appreciate this film. Nor do they need to know who I am dating. It’s not important.”

I haven’t asked who he is dating but since he raised the subject, he did make some intriguingly ambiguous comments about his sexual orientation at the time Brokeback Mountain came out. A broad grin spreads across his face and he covers his head with his hands. “I know, I know.”

He is single at the moment. For several years he had an on-off affair with Kirsten Dunst. And yet…

So let’s get it on the record: is he saying he is open to persuasion? “No, I am not open to persuasion myself, but the idea of homosexuality is acceptable to me. I grew up in a city where half the people I know are gay.”

OK, having established that he is not bisexual, was he being quite calculating when he allowed people to think he was? “It was meant as a way of saying it was important for Heath [Ledger, his co-star in Brokeback Mountain] and I to have the movie exist as the movie, but also to have people know it was two straight actors playing those parts.”

When he experiences genuine emotions in his own life — anger, grief, love — do they feel less authentic because he has had to fake them in films?

“Hmm. Have I devalued the currency? I tell you, when I fall in love in real life it has felt nothing like I have acted it in the movies.”

Gyllenhaal’s parents are also in the film industry — his father is a director, his mother a scriptwriter (she was Oscar nominated for Running on Empty). And his sister is the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, who made her name in Secretary.

Must have been weird for him to watch that one, I say, especially the erotically charged scenes in which his sister is stripped and spanked by her boss.

“Well, it wasn’t necessarily erotic for me. It’s funny, when she was first going for auditions everyone was telling her she wasn’t sexy, not sexual.

“I remember her buying some skimpy cut-off dress for one audition and it just wasn’t her. Now she’s treated as a sex object.

“Go figure.”

‘Rendition’ is in cinemas nationwide