Top 100 Jake Gyllenhaal Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “My experience on ‘Jarhead’ was life changing.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

52. “There are standards. I like to be prepared, I guess I should say – that type of pressure of, “All right, now you go with abandon,” you know. Now when you’re in it, you let go of all the things – that’s what happens when you’re onstage.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

53. “I like the conscious manipulation that a great director can have. When you’re both complicit in the manipulation of an emotion.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

54. “Sometimes you need an anchor, whatever it might be. You need a space to connect. So often you get into a way of doing things.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

55. “My mum raised us on classic movies and a lot of musical theatre.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

56. “As much as I am one for real human interaction, I also want to make a show that’s entertaining and that people want to see.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

57. “There’s always an intellectual side to the films Ang Lee’s doing and to the characters, and there’s such a deep knowledge when you’ve worked with the actors that he’s worked with, on stage in particular, but also in film.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

58. “There are a lot of different things that are spinning and connecting when your family sees what you do.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

59. “Do I take care of my body and take conditioning seriously? Yes.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

60. “In a perfect world, I would love to do one play for every three movies.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

61. “I think I find tactile things, you know. Just the feeling of blood itself is enough for me. If you, even if it’s not real blood. I mean that’s enough, like sometimes there are very simple things that are enough.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

62. “I was working with Michael Shannon and I was like, “Oh man I’m having trouble with this scene.” And he’s like, “Well, then just open it up.” I was like, “But, the mark?” And I was like, what’s wrong with me? And he was like, “Dude, what’s wrong with you?””

— Jake Gyllenhaal

63. “At Columbia there’s no performing arts department, so I was searching for it everywhere I could, and I took some photography classes and I ended up becoming fascinated with Eastern Religion, and ultimately it seemed to encompass the more abstract mind that I have.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

64. “As an actor, no matter what, you’re at the whim of so many other people all the time.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

65. “Even as an actor, I think like a storyteller. My parents raised us to look at the script.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

66. “When you have the opportunity to choose projects, inevitably you start being moved towards the things that you’re moved by, right? And that changes over time, as we change, right?”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

67. “As a producer, you have an opportunity to see the whole and bring people together.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

68. “I’m always nervous about it. You know, somehow, without even knowing it, I try and recreate the idea of what it feels like to go in front of an audience every night when I’m making a film. And that similar type of pressure and excitement before a scene, or preparing for a movie, so...”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

69. “I’ve decided as an actor the only, the power I have really is in the performance. It’s the only real place I get to sort of communicate.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

70. “I admire actors and artists who devote just as much time to their life as they do to their work.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

71. “The best thing that I got was rehearsing with my father. It was always about the process of figuring things out, and trying something new, and having another take on something and keeping it alive.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

72. “There’s no shame in somebody who doesn’t necessarily do that job knowing a little bit more in that instance than you might know about your own job, you know, and I think that is where movies are such a collaborative art form.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

73. “I’m a harsh critic, you know? I am.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

74. “To me I just, I’m a geek when it comes to cinematographers. And when it comes to Robert and when it comes to someone like Roger Deakins who shot Prisoners and he shot Jarhead.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

75. “I want, overall, to trust what I know is right. There have been many times when I haven’t.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

76. “When I was young, before school, my father would wake me up and we would go running together. A love of being physical, being active and being outside was something he instilled in me.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

77. “In that way, as an actor in particular, you’re powerless. And so in that way as an actor in particular you can’t make mistakes.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

78. “Hardest emotion? They’re all pretty damn hard; I don’t know really if there’s one specifically, but I do think, I don’t know what’s happening or what I’m feeling when I’m actually listening.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

79. “I think, now, younger generations do take that for granted in a lot of ways. I don’t think that takes away from the struggle of identity and what that is. But the struggle for identity is everybody’s struggle. No matter what it is.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

80. “I didn’t know many classes where I could try and relate the thing that I really loved and wanted to do into an intellectual idea.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

81. “People say to me, well “What’s the character you really want to play?” And I go, I don’t know.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

82. “I was brought up, and my sister too, with two people who were always saying, “What you do is really nowhere near as important as the things that are going on in the world, and if your work needs to reflect that, or you want it to, then you need to strive for a certain type of excellence.””

— Jake Gyllenhaal

83. “They’re the darkest people I know, comedians.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

84. “I have a profound respect for cinematographers. That is my secret sauce. Like they are everything to me.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

85. “I don’t think I’m sharp enough to not prepare and come on set and kill it.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

86. “When I walk into a screening, I’m nervous in a different way than I am as an actor. But the response is ultimately I know how I feel about it and that’s what matters to me the most.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

87. “I think that I have done work where I feel like I’ve challenged myself, and then what’s even more confusing is I’ve done work where I think I’ve challenged myself and no one’s responded to it, and no one’s interested in it.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

88. “We all develop relationships with each other based on our first relationships, and then how we experience them. But inevitably they are echoes of earlier on. In my belief.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

89. “As an actor, I feel like I’m somebody who, when somebody gives me a mark, I don’t want to hit it. I don’t like that. But then, without even knowing it, I just hit it.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

90. “I think, in the initial process of discovering a character and the analytical process – and this is what I did take from Buddhism – initially I think there has to be an analytical, intellectual approach. And that has to be abandoned by the time you’re playing the game.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

91. “When you find theater writing like in the theater on film but it’s realistic, it doesn’t matter who the character is, you want to do it.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

92. “I had not spent a ton of time around animals as a kid.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

93. “I think, when someone say, “When did you feel like an actor?” it’s those moments when I feel like, “I’m an actor, wow.” That’s an extraordinary moment for me. So it’s not like I walk around going, “I’m an actor.””

— Jake Gyllenhaal

94. “Not to say that you should be constantly trying to change the world, but I think it’s important to know that whatever we do has an implication and has an effect, and because of that it is political.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

95. “I don’t have a “I want to play this or that,” I just don’t have that. I’ve never been like that.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

96. “I think my strength is to do a take all the way through. I am definitely not someone who can do a sprint. Maybe I am not that smart, but it takes me a while to find the moment, and I like to be pushed toward it.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

97. “I’m a very political person, and I make political choices in my movies.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

98. “I like the idea of the adventurer’s spirit. I think that is very much what a man searches for, in a certain way.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

99. “I always find you go back to an animal; it will always show you the sort of primal aspects of behavior. You always know how to respond if you choose that.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal

100. “I think you hear a lot of people say ‘I support the troops’ and all of that, but I really feel deeply that I do.”

— Jake Gyllenhaal