In Demolition, Jake Gyllenhaal channels his grief into an unusual home makeover
The actor, who plays a bereaved Wall Street banker in his latest film, a role for which he learned to operate a bulldozer, says the hardest scene to perform was an unscripted dance on the New York subway
In the movie Demolition, actor Jake Gyllenhaal loses his wife in a traffic accident, pours his heart out to a vending machine company, and smashes up his home with a sledgehammer.
But perhaps the biggest challenge in the drama-comedy about grief was having to free-style dance through throngs of New York commuters as his bereaved Wall Street banker character throws out society’s expectations.
Gyllenhaal, 35, said the unchoreographed sequence, shot on a subway and on the streets of New York, was the scene that most terrified him.
“I was really very nervous about that sequence. [Director] Jean-Marc Vallée said you’re going to just dance around and I thought, ‘Oh God, what is this going to be like?’ You have all those feelings of fear and embarrassment,” he says.
“And then I was also nervous [that] it was going to be recorded, you know, for film, for a long time.”
Demolition is Gyllenhaal’s third film in 12 months after playing a boxer who also loses his wife in Southpaw , and an American mountaineer in disaster movie Everest .
