Jake Gyllenhaal's preparation to play champion boxer
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E-mail CNTV, July 17, 2015
Movie roles often call on actors to undergo varying degrees of physical transformation, but for Jake Gyllenhaal, playing a world-champion boxer was especially daunting. Ten years after his Oscar-winning performance in "Brokeback Mountain", how did Gyllenhaal prepare for his latest film "Southpaw"?
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Jake Gyllenhaal's preparation to play champion boxer |
It's a transformation of 'Rocky' proportions. Before being cast as boxer Billy Hope for the movie 'Southpaw', Jake Gyllenhaal says he "didn't even know how to throw a punch". But here, he has to convince audiences he's the Light Heavyweight Champion of the world!
"So I spent five months learning how to box. I spent two times a day. I decided in my mind, I was mostly just terrified that I was going to look like an idiot when we got to shooting the movie, so I figured I needed to learn," he said.
"And the way (director) Antoine (Fuqua) wanted to shoot the movie was as realistically as possible. He didn't want doubles. He wanted to shoot it like an HBO/Showtime fight. He was going to hire all those guys who film those fights to film the fight. And so I thought, whew!"
Gyllenhaal trained as hard as he could, twice a day for five months, making a lean, mean physical transformation so dramatic, that even some of his fans may not recognize him as the movie begins.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua, who made "Training Day", and written by Kurt Sutter, 'Southpaw' is also a story about family. Having already lost his wife, Gyllenhaal's character is threatened with the loss of his young daughter to a child-welfare system that scarred his own childhood. Outside of the ring, this is the real fight of his life.
"And you meet him at the beginning of the movie with that understanding of his rage as being that thing that brings him success. And it's that same rage that ultimately tears apart a lot of the things that he loves and destroys his life," he said.
The role is just one of the new challenges Gyllenhaal has taken on this year. In January, he marked his Broadway debut in the original play "Constellations". And in July, he was in New York City for the musical "Little Shop of Horrors", opposite the show's original leading lady in 1982, Ellen Greene.
"When I was on stage with her doing the show, singing 'Suddenly Seymour', even just acting with her, or listening to her sing the reprise of 'Somewhere That's Green', there I am holding her, and she's doing the line where she goes, 'When I die ...Which should be very shortly,' where she's doing those types of things and she's in your arms and you're playing that part, I realize that all the movies that I had done, all the work that I had done up to that point, that was the reason I was there. The reason I did all that work was for that moment."
"Southpaw" goes on release this month.
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