The last time NPR’s Audie Cornish spoke with Jake Gyllenhaal it was in the fall of 2013. They met on the set of the film Nightcrawler, and at the time, the tabloids were talking about how much weight he’d lost for the role. Cornish remembers he was gaunt, his blue eyes were sunken in — and he didn’t blink.
“When you met me I was not wholly aware of how I was behaving,” he tells Cornish a year later. “Probably because I had put myself through certain things. In a weird way thought I was normal, but according to you — not so much.”
Once you see Nightcrawler, that makes a lot of sense. In it, Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom — hungry and prowling the lamp-lit streets of Los Angeles. He stumbles on work as a freelance cameraman for a TV station with an “if it bleeds, it leads” ethos.
Gyllenhaal says what sticks with him is the way that his character deploys the cheery language of self-help guides even as he tries to break into a business built on misery. Gyllenhaal says he memorized the script and it’s now ingrained in his memory. He easily recites the film’s first speech:
“Excuse me, sir. I’m looking for a job. In fact, I’ve made my mind up to find a career that I can learn and grow into. Who am I? I’m a hard worker, I set high goals and I’ve been told that I’m persistent. Now I’m not feeling myself, sir. Having been raised with the self-esteem movement so popular in schools, I used to expect my needs to be considered. But I know that today’s work culture no longer caters to the job loyalty that could be promised to earlier generations.”
On paper it doesn’t look so bad, “but out in the world — taking a few morals out of the equation — it can be pretty dangerous,” Gyllenhaal says. “He speaks like a real entrepreneur; he speaks like a very successful entrepreneur. I mean, there is nothing he says in this movie that I don’t agree with. I agree with everything this character says in one way or another. It’s what he does that I don’t necessarily agree with.”
Interview Highlights
On the business of real “night crawlers”