Jake Gyllenhaal, Felt Trapped While Filming ‘The Guilty’

JAKE Gyllenhaal says he felt trapped while filming his latest movie, The Guilty.

Gyllenhaal first collaborated with director Antoine Fuqua for Southpaw, a film about a boxer who loses his wife in an accident, which received largely positive reviews and fared well at the box office with a $94 million gross.

Now, Gyllenhaal is reuniting with Fuqua for a Netflix crime-thriller titled The Guilty, a remake of the 2018 Danish film of the same name.

With a script from Nic Pizzolatto (True Detective), The Guilty finds a police officer named Joe Baylor recently demoted to an emergency call dispatch desk. One fateful night, he receives a call from a kidnapped woman and springs into action to try and save her, all while remaining restrained by his desk job.

The film will play out in real-time and is expected to rarely leave Gyllenhaal’s character at the 911 call center. The film boasts a star-studded cast that also includes Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, Eli Goree, Paul Dano, Peter Sarsgaard, and Bill Burr, many of them appearing in voice roles only.

Now that The Guilty has had its world premiere at TIFF, Jake Gyllenhaal is opening up about the unique experience he had making the movie. In an interview with The Wrap, the actor says he was trapped in a chair for the majority of production and could only hear other actors deliver their lines through Zoom without ever being able to see them. As filming progressed, Gyllenhaal says he felt like the cameras were closing in on him.

Read how Gyllenhaal described the experience below: It was 20 pages a day shooting 20-30 minute takes. And I thrive in that space, but I was trapped in a chair. Antoine trapped me in a chair. Every time I wanted to move, I’m a very physical person, a very full-bodied actor, and to only be in a chair and having to express ended up doing a number on me as we got farther and farther into the story. Stillness is one thing, but then being trapped is another thing, and it brought out a lot of feelings in me and reveals a lot about this character too.

Considering how his character is confined to a desk throughout the film, it’s easy to imagine how Gyllenhaal began to feel trapped during production, especially since he’s usually such a physical actor. Over the 11 days it took to shoot The Guilty, director Antoine Fuqua could see the other actors on the monitor, but Gyllenhaal could only hear them. This seems to be a smart move by the director as it helped immerse his lead actor in the experience of his character.

The Guilty has gotten two trailers so far, revealing the film’s frantic and claustrophobic energy. This is heavily reminiscent of Tom Hardy’s Locke, as his titular character is the only one ever seen on screen as he holds numerous conversations over the phone, which can be extremely difficult for actors since there are no other performers on set for them to feed off of.

Audiences can see if Gyllenhaal’s performance measures up when The Guilty releases on Netflix on September 24.

(source: screenrant.com)

(ROHN ROMULO)