Jake Gyllenhaal: "Prisoners" interviews, next project: "Everest"

Of course, there's a flip side to playing a watchful, observant loner. "The character is hiding from his own thing. He's scared of his past. I wanted that in the scenes. But it sometimes took me away from my real life. I haven't worked since that. I'm about to start working again. It took a while to not look at everybody and question them. 'What's your truth?' Everyone is like, '(Expletive) off. Go deal with your truth,'" says Gyllenhaal.

The finished product is challenging to sit through, especially for a parent, because it's the manifestation of every mother and father's nightmare: children going missing while playing outdoors in a bucolic neighborhood. "My wife watching it was literally gripping my hand. As far as my character goes, my wife would go further. She would lay waste to an entire landscape. There's a lioness, that's my wife," says Jackman. Though Gyllenhaal doesn't have kids, he spends ample time with his nieces Ramona and Gloria, the daughters of big sister Maggie. But Jackman is the dad of Oscar, 13, and Ava, 8 — he understands just how brutal the subject matter is.

"Even reading the script, I felt the pit in my stomach. The key was being specific. The more research I did about it, the more I felt that weight of responsibility. Every day in the papers this story is played out," he says. Source: www.usatoday.com

Jake Gyllenhaal - Los Angeles Times portrait

 -You're next working on Everest. Did your experience with Bear Grylls on Man vs Wild help you prepare?

 -With Everest, it's a story that I've always been fascinated with - even as just a metaphor. The idea of what is seemingly unattainable, but the reasons why people go there and try and as they say "conquer" a mountain. That is a fascinating turn of phrase. That somehow getting to the top of it is conquering it. Source: www.gq-magazine.co.uk