I remember a few months back seeing pictures of Jake Gyllenhaal looking gaunt and frail and thinking “he is either doing this for a movie, is deathly ill, or is on drugs. Either way, he looks FABULOUS!” Lucky for us all, the 33 year-old actor was, in fact, slimmed down for the role of a desperately unemployed man named Lou in the film ‘Nightcrawler.’ Of course, when I first heard that he playing the lead role in a movie called ‘Nightcrawler,’ I was kind of expecting a new X-Men movie and I was not alone in this assumption.
As it turns out, Jake Gyllenhaal’s ‘Nightcrawler’ is far more interesting than another stupid friggin 3-D comic book spin-off movie. Here is a description of the film, via The Playlist.
Titled “Nightcrawler,” the crime thriller is the directorial debut of screenwriter Dan Gilroy, the writer of “Freejack” and “Chasers,” the co-writer of “The Bourne Legacy” and brother of Tony Gilroy (the screenwriter behind the ‘Bourne’ series, “Michael Clayton” among many others). “Nightcrawler” is about an out of work man (Gyllenhaal) who man stumbles upon the underground world of L.A. freelance crime journalism.
I wish I could say that this time I will NOT fall for the age-old gimmick of actors gaining or losing ridiculous amounts of weight for some Oscar-bait role in a Hollywood movie… but I really wanna see this movie. Look at how weird Gyllenhaal’s face looks! It looks like he actually managed to lose weight in his eyelids, and now his eyes are struggling to stay inside of his skull! And beyond his physical appearance, the teaser makes a pretty convincing case that Gyllenhaal is going to be amazing in this movie. Just the right amount of creepy to be intriguing. It’s a big risk to make a trailer where the lead actor is interviewing for a job, but it worked. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing this movie. You’re hired, Jake.