In A New Broadway Play, Jake Gyllenhaal Attempts Something Radical: Normality

JAKE GYLLENHAAL IS NO STRANGER TO PLAYING strangers.

- Belinda Luscombe

He’s Hollywood’s go-to guy for delivering loners, slippery souls who aren’t quite what they seem, dudes who are hiding something behind those hedgerow eyebrows, from the tortured cowboy in Brokeback Mountain to the obsessive cop with a history in Prisoners to the superhero Mysterio who’s neither super nor hero in his current film Spider-Man: Far From Home.

However, for six nights a week during a brief stint on Broadway this summer, Gyllenhaal is transforming into what may be one of his most alien characters yet: a regular bloke, with the same daunting problems nearly everyone faces, the departure of a parent and the arrival of a child. And unlike so many of the men Gyllenhaal inhabits, the guy in Sea Wall/A Life, a two-act show in which Gyllenhaal’s character Abe handles the second half, actually does want to talk about it. “I don’t understand why we prepare so f-cking wonderfully and elaborately for birth,” says Abe, “and yet so appallingly and haphazardly for death.”

The actor, 38, has no wife, no child and two living parents, TV director Stephen Gyllenhaal and screenwriter Naomi Foner. He doesn’t even really, he says, have a home. “I don’t know if I would necessarily say I’ve settled anywhere,” says Gyllenhaal, sitting in his dressing room a few hours before the second preview of the show. “I feel like I’m constantly moving.” But he recoils at the idea that he’s in unfamiliar terrain when taking on such visceral human transitions as the death and birth of family. “I have lost a lot of people that I love. I do know the feeling of loss. And I do know the feeling of deeply, deeply loving,” he says. “I have been at the birth of children that I love. I think those feelings are actually much closer than we assume.”