Jake Gyllenhaal at the LA premiere of "End of Watch"

Credit: AP Photo/Todd Williamson

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NEW YORK -- I'm running a little late as I make it over to the Laura Pels Theater on 46th Street. When I get there, a tiny crowd surrounds Jake Gyllenhaal, bearded and maned for his performance in the off-Broadway play "If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet." He's almost unrecognizable, which goes a long way toward explaining why the crowd is tiny. He's gracious, all smiles, answering questions.

Later, backstage at the theater, he recalls what it was about the piece that made him finally break his long hiatus from the stage. Written by Nick Payne, the George Devine Award-winning play features Gyllenhaal (in his New York theater debut) as Terry, a loafer uncle to an affection-starved, overweight teenage girl. It's a quartet piece but Gyllenhaal shines, largely because of his character's idiosyncratic nature. That nature was founded in the play's dialogue, which Gyllenhaal says was like trying to unlock a Rubik's Cube.

"The character stops in the middle of thoughts and he continues into the middle of the next one," the 31-year-old actor says. "Sometimes he'll pick back up parenthetically like four or five lines back down. So you don't just have to find the attention, you have to fill in the blank…The story is so obtuse; it's the same thing. You begin at the middle of the scene and you finish before the situation actually ends. So to me, I was just fascinated by that and it started to guide me."

Gyllenhaal says he always felt comfortable in front of a live audience and, ever since he was a kid, enjoyed mimicry. A cockney Brit was one of his "stock characters that are always used as caricatures that aren't really necessary," he says. "They're kind of like the simple shape and form and mold of a sculpture."

The language itself, though, the rhythms of it, made the part irresistible. He could even see the architecture of the dialogue for each character on the page. All of Terry's dialogue is on the left side of the page, never making it past half-way across. The starting and stopping gives tangible shape to the thing, and as to informing character, it almost serves as a defense mechanism. As the play's director Michael Longhurst put it in a telephone interview, "When characters speak like that, it's often to avoid what he's trying to say. He spends his time asking people how they are. It's a way of avoiding how he's doing. It's a very British thing to do, deflect, deflect, deflect."

And so Gyllenhaal starts in with his accent to illustrate the point: "When I first come in I'm like, 'Probably should have rung or something,' period. 'But phone was fucked,' period. 'And I thought,' period. 'By the time I was trying to get change for the fucking,' period. 'You know, the phone and that,' period. 'Then I might as well just,' period…It's crazy! But that's the way he writes, and unlocking it is what's fun."

All of that makes for lengthy introduction to how language and behavior was the key to success when Gyllenhaal signed on to play a Los Angeles police officer in David Ayer's "End of Watch." A new spin on found footage (though that's not really what this is -- Gyllenhaal's character films much of his exploits and so that point of view becomes diegetic for the film's purposes), "End of Watch" tells the story of a pair of patrolmen who spend their days on the southeast side of LA going after gang-bangers and drug-pushers until one unfortunate day, they open too many doors and find themselves the target of a Mexican drug cartel.

Gyllenhaal was looking for something new in his life and, according to Ayer, chased the project down. "I think he was just frustrated," Ayer said by telephone. "He wanted to act. He wanted to just sink his teeth into a role and act and not be distracted by the sort of big business side of things. He wanted to lose himself and he wanted to be reinvented…He's just like, 'Look, I'm sick of everything. I'm sick of my life and I want to change it. I want change.' And that's all I heard, is that he's ready to transform. His heart was really open at that time and he was really receptive to doing something totally different and giving me the total commitment that I needed for this movie to work…I told him, 'Look, if this works out, you're going to come out of this a different person.' And I think that happened."

Here was an immersion of a whole other sort. For months Gyllenhaal underwent tactical training and participated in police car ride-alongs with co-star Michael Peña. And again, the way his character spoke was key to who he was.

"There were things Dave would write, where, for instance, there was a speech where I 'm talking about going on dates," Gyllenhaal says, before reading off some of the scene: "'I get laid without a badge, thank you very much. There's a pattern here, an MO. First date, respectful kiss. Second date's dinner.' And Dave was like, 'Enunciate.' And when we were rehearsing he'd be like, 'Enunciate. Enunciate. Enunciate.' And then I started to realize that the thing about this guy was everything he said, when he talked to people, was very clear. This is going to happen. That's going to happen. And that all definitely went into it."

As he describes the philosophy his voice mimics what he's talking about, crisp, precise, a 180 from the bubbly Brit he was just moments before.

The ride-along aspect of the prep was particularly crucial. He and Peña did two or three each week for five months. The first call he went on, someone was murdered and died right in front of him. There was a domestic violence call that didn't turn out the way he had expected at all when they "rolled up on two dudes," he says. "And it was brutal. The crazy thing to me was watching two police officers switch from their relationship to getting the call and the focus in that. Watching human behavior, for me, it just blew my mind. That was the hardest thing for Mike and I to get, that switch. And Dave talked about it all the time, but watching that was crazy, every time, because it was like sort of fun or just interacting, normal, joking, normal, joking [and suddenly] life and death."

He admits he had trouble shaking it all off when he'd return from the experience on multiple occasions, noting the under-considered effect of post-traumatic stress disorder in law enforcement officers. "It would take me two or three hours to get to bed, to finally just chill the fuck out," he says. "By the end, we're seeing murders and shootings and it just became something normal. I was very surprised at how desensitized I became, and Michael and I talked about that a lot."

Kristopher Tapley
Editor-at-Large

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Kristopher Tapley has covered the film awards landscape for over a decade. He founded In Contention in 2005. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Times of London and Variety. He begs you not to take any of this too seriously.