Interview: Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway talk nudity in 'Love and Other Drugs'

There was already a level of comfort between Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway when they arrived on the set of “Love and Other Drugs.” The two had a love scene together in “Brokeback Mountain” and, despite that shoot lasting only eight days, the saw “potential” for another project together. 

“I knew Jake was a great guy and that he was a gentleman,” Hathaway said in her interview with HitFix. And not that those are two qualities that are required for chemistry on screen, but it certainly helped in “Other Drugs,” considering the amount of screen time -- and “the unusual amount of nudity” – there was in the script.

In fact, the nudity was one factor Hathaway considered before she finally, formally signed on.

“She had questions about the character itself,” Gyllenhaal mentioned.

Hathaway explained there were a lot of "high-risk aspects” to her character Maggie Murdoch, who let an assortment of men – including Gyllenhaal’s womanizing drug rep Jamie -- into her bed, despite keeping all manner of people at arms distance. Maggie suffers from early stages of Parkinson’s and struggles to live freely and with her disease simultaneously. There was plenty of nudity and plenty of high emotions and, “If [Maggie] wasn’t grounded in something honest that would explain it all, I didn’t know that those made sense.”

But Gyllenhaal promised those contrasts would make sense and he "begged" for her to join.

“What worked in the script from the very beginning was the connection between these two people,” Gyllenhaal says. “The choices we make [as actors] are always based on character. It just so happened in order to tell the story right, we knew we’d have to be naked and intimate together, literally and figuratively. Now we have to deal with a lot of questions about how naked we are in the movie, but the truth is… people get naked when they’re in love.”

Watch the full interview above.

“Love and Other Drugs” is out in theaters on Nov. 24.