WASHINGTON — “I didn’t come to Washington, D.C., to talk,” said Jake Gyllenhaal, before plunging into a crowd of cameraphone-wielding college students still gobsmacked by the actor’s surprise appearance last weekend at a late-night screening of the new movie “Nightcrawler.” “l came to Washington, D.C., to take some pictures and selfies and s---.”
Gyllenhaal proved true to his word, offering the crowd only a single rhetorical question before handing off the microphone. “How f---ed up do you feel, on a scale of 1 to 10?” he asked those who had just seen the movie, which features his disturbing yet much buzzed-about performance as a sociopathic freelance TV news cameraman. “Ten would make me so happy, if we really f---ed you up.”
Without pausing for a response, the actor exploded into the excited but decorous scrum, a human stun grenade of piercing blue eyes and stubble. “They’re telling me to use ‘#nightcrawlermovie,’ “ he shouted, before disappearing in a constellation of camera flashes.
Gyllenhaal’s reticence was only an act.
During the brief appearance at a Georgetown theater – the third and final stop of a day-long charter-flight blitz of similar appearances in Boston and Philadelphia – the actor, accompanied by writer-director Dan Gilroy, managed to squeeze in several minutes of thoughtful conversation about the film while two SUVs idled outside.
According to both men, Gyllenhaal’s character of Lou Bloom is troubling, and not just because he’s a dangerously deranged freak who veers into volatile behavior that Gyllenhaal calls both “ethically and morally unsound.”
“We all have a part of Lou in us,” says Gyllenhaal, 33. Gilroy goes further, describing the film as a modern-day Horatio Alger story.
“We always talked about the film as a kind of success story,” Gilroy says. “I feel that if you came back in 10 years, Lou would be running a major multinational corporation. I mean that seriously. All the behavior that he does and exhibits in that world would serve him extraordinarily well in the boardroom.”
Gyllenhaal agrees. “I think that’s where people walk out feeling a bit disturbed.” If the movie registers a 10 on the “f---ed up” scale, Gyllenhaal argues, it isn’t because Lou is a monster, but because he’s an ordinary man.
A man who looks a lot like, well, Jake Gyllenhaal. “There’s no way of me not being like him,” he says. “He’s my skin and, in a weird way, I’m his.”
The actor, who famously lost 30 pounds for the role of Lou, has been on a dark-movie kick in recent years, with edgy turns in “End of Watch,” “Enemy” and “Prisoners.” His “Nightcrawler” performance, which calls for a mix of predatory behavior and Machiavellian charm, is delivered with an intensity that led to the actor slicing open his hand in an accident involving a broken mirror — and a trip to the hospital. That scene is only one of many that reveal a surprising reservoir of darkness and ambition that is not just creepy but strangely relatable.
“Expectations are a wonderful thing to disturb,” says the actor, acknowledging that his portrayal of Lou could be getting something of a bump from the fact that it both subverts and leverages the shy and self-effacing persona that we may be used to seeing on — and off — camera. “I think that’s essentially what’s fascinating about the Jenga game of performances over a career,” he says. “Intentions change. If you listen to your own mind enough, and if you’re not afraid to go into darker spaces in that mind that you’ve been given, then I think that you can illuminate some things about yourself. And then also, I think, hopefully help the story.”
According to Gilroy, that story is a “legitimate indictment of journalism” in the way it shows Lou exploiting, and ultimately manipulating, news footage to satisfy a ratings-hungry news producer, played by Rene Russo. Yet both Gilroy (who’s married to Russo) and Gyllenhaal see larger themes, too – themes of an insatiable entertainment media that are echoed in the well-orchestrated PR campaign for the film itself, of which this slightly surreal Georgetown scene is only one small part.
The irony doesn’t escape Gyllenhaal, who has time for a few quick rhetorical questions about the nature of celebrity, hashtag culture and the Internet before hopping into the chariot waiting to take him back to Washington Dulles International Airport.
“If watching a celebrity go get a cup of coffee is as interesting somewhere – because it has as many hits, because that’s how we calculate it – as the State of the Union, the question is: Where are we? And has it always been like this? Is it just a simpler way for us to calculate, because it’s right there in front of us? Or is something changing in how we consume, and what we’re becoming? Does a character like Lou thrive, and are we giving him fertile ground to thrive, when information is just becoming infotainment?”
This time, though, Gyllenhaal offers an answer, of sorts, to his own questions: “It’s just something to feed the beast. In a culture where we’re upset when our Uber car is three minutes late – in that three-minute space – Lou (is) given the chance to bloom.”
