Jake Gyllenhaal goes for the offbeat in Okja
Jake Gyllenhaal says he was motivated by one goal above all others while shooting the fantasy Okja: making his Korean director giggle.
“It’s legitimately fun to get him to laugh off-camera,” Gyllenhaal said in an interview alongside Okja director Bong Joon-ho who was, naturally, chuckling as Gyllenhaal spoke. “You know when you get the giggle we’re going to print it and move on.”
Bong and Gyllenhaal had met occasionally since 2007, and were inevitably drawn together by their affinity for the strange and its intersection with comedy. Okja is a disturbing kind of fable in which a young girl has raised a massive, genetically modified animal named Okja.
Ten years on, the New York conglomerate that manufactured the animal comes to the remote South Korean mountains to retrieve its invention, one intended to provide a new profitable source of genetically modified food. Gyllenhaal, in a performance that will rank alongside any of the actor’s previous extremes, plays a television zoologist working on behalf of the company (which is run by a pair of sisters, both played by Tilda Swinton.) He’s a high-strung cocktail of neuroses. His voice, Bong suggested, should mimic the highest, unplayable registers of a guitar.
“There are a plethora of these kinds of television hosts and the oddity of how they behave, which is speaking to children and getting a certain amount of attention from that, and being this broken child himself,” Gyllenhaal said. “So I think he misunderstands how he talks to people because he’s so used to getting attention from being like (in kids-show host voice) ‘Hey!’ It’s sort of a performance on top of a performance all the time.”
Though Gyllenhaal (Zodiac, Donnie Darko) has carved out a career playing characters with compulsions and manias, he’s a little sheepish about the theatricality of his zoologist, Johnny Wilcox, in Okja. But such
bold mixtures of darkness, he says, come with the territory in a Bong Joon-Ho film. “Particularly Tilda’s and my character allow for this ability of reality and fantasy to coexist,”
Gyllenhaal said. “That freedom you feel, you’re safe in his hands. It’s fun. It’s not wracked with searching. It’s just this crazy jumping off a massive cliff.”