Look closely at the poster for the Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway Viagra-and-Parkinson’s comedy Love and Other Drugs. Apparently, director Edward Zwick was actually naked and in the shot with his stars, but got Photoshopped out. At least that’s what we heard at Zwick and Gyllenhaal’s recent New Yorker Festival Q&A with Anthony Lane. According to Zwick, Gyllenhaal and Hathaway had been complaining about how often he’d forced them to do nude scenes. “I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’” said Zwick. “And they said, ‘You take your clothes off.’ And I said, ‘Fine!’” Said Gyllenhaal: “It’s weird how eager you were, too. He was like, ‘That’s it? No problem!’ And then it was off. It terrified me! Like, all of a sudden, this really intimate relationship became way, way weird.” Then, says Zwick, all three of them snapped a naked photo together. “The art director looked at it and said, ‘Get rid of the director,’ and he stripped me out and put Annie’s head on Jake’s shoulder, and that’s the movie poster.”
Also, we learned a few other fun facts about Gyllenhaal:
• He’s masturbated “four or five times in four or five different movies.” In The Good Girl, he said, “I decided my character was going to masturbate with his left hand. That was my character choice.”
• His early acting career mostly consisted of sitting in the background while his older sister Maggie sang and danced for dinner guests. “I did everything wrong, according to her. So I was always banished to the corner,” he said. “Les Mis, when she put that on, I was just a poor person sitting in the corner, begging for money, and she sang and danced all the songs. It’s never changed. It’s still like that to this day.”
• He filmed Donnie Darko when he was having a hard time in college and didn’t know where he was going in life. (He dropped out.) After it screened at Sundance, he said, “My mother and father and sister came up to me afterwards, crying, sort of realizing that I had been trying to say something to them about how lost I was. Something about talking to that rabbit at the time comforted me.”
• He accidentally offended the entire crew of Brokeback Mountain when he showed off his first “bad acting” attempt to play Jack Twist at age 40. “We did the first take and I was doing all this bad acting, like, limping around and my back was achy and I picked up this saddle and I grunted, and half of the crew was 40. They were like, ‘We’re 40. We’re not 80! We do more work than you do, you wimp actor.” Also, looking back on his performance, he really regrets the mustache, though he thinks it helped his acting. “It was hard to eat with that mustache,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s the pain that brings great performances.”
• His dream list of collaborators: Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Gosling, and Michelle Williams, again.
• He said this about Love’s love scenes: “There’s this weird sense of being watched. If you’ve ever made out with anybody and you know you’re being watched, you can’t help but watch yourself, and that just takes the sexiness out of the whole thing. But we’re performers, so you can make it work. Occasionally I’ve been into it. I won’t talk about with whom.” And then he laughed a lot. But seriously, we need names.
