Jake Gyllenhaal has starred in many movies, but few might have moved him the way this 2010 feature did. So much so that Gyllenhaal remembered breaking down in tears as soon as he read its script.
Jake Gyllenhaal cried when he read the script for ‘Love & Other Drugs’
Love & Other Drugs was a 2010 romantic drama and comedy co-starring Gyllenhaal and Hathaway. Gyllenhaal played a pharmaceutical salesman who falls in love with a young woman living with Parkinson’s.
For Gyllenhaal, the script couldn’t have arrived at a more perfect time. The End of Watch actor was already going through a reflective period where he was meditating on the concept of love. The script touched on themes he was already fascinated by.
“I just think there comes a time in different people’s lives where they say do I have real love? Do I want real love? What is real love? With the script I seemed to be in a time when that was a pressing question,” Gyllenhaal once told BANG Showbiz (via Contact Music).
Gyllenhaal eventually had a powerful emotional response to the film’s story the longer he read the script.
“With this, I very rarely have a moment where I get excited and I go, ‘Somebody wrote this for me and they don’t know it.’ And I felt that way when I read this the first time and I was loving the character at first and then I was crying at the end because I felt like when he says, ‘Sometimes your life doesn’t go the way you expect it to,’ and usually it doesn’t,” he said. “And if you follow life and not really think it should be that way then it’ll all work out in the end. That just really moved me to the core and I couldn’t not do it.”
Jake Gyllenhaal once confided how falling in love scared him
Gyllenhaal once shared he was a believer in traditional marriages. In his younger years, he found himself romantically linked with quite a few high-profile stars. Without giving any names, the Nightcrawler star confided that he’d fallen in love at least three times. But he blamed himself for his past relationships eventually dissolving.
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“It was me, man,” Gyllenhaal once said on The Howard Stern Show (via People). “I think I probably just got scared.”
But Gyllenhaal remained optimistic about being married one day. It all came down to learning from his experiences and meeting a compatible partner.
“There are a lot of beautiful women, and there are opportunities. But at the same time, if you find the right person … I believe in monogamy. I believe in when you meet somebody who’s right, it will be right, and you’ll stay there,” he said.
Jake Gyllenhaal has become more interested in love than his career
As he’s matured, Gyllenhaal has put more priority over his family and his relationships than his work. It’s a decision he made after discovering what too much focus on his work could cost him.
“I’ve reached a point in my career where I feel hungry in a different way. I’ve seen how much of my life I’ve neglected as a result of being committed to that work and that idea,” he said in a 2020 interview with Vogue.
Apart from simply being around loved ones, Gyllenhaal sees himself starting his own family sometime in the future. He’s been in a relationship with French model Jeanne Cadieu for a couple of years now. So Cadieu might end up being the person the actor soon settles down with.
