Answering the call
Jake Gyllenhaal is all ears as 911 dispatcher in ‘The Guilty’
At 40, Jake Gyllenhaal is focusing on storytelling, serving as both star and executive producer of Netflix’s “The Guilty.” An ingenious thriller, “The Guilty” follows a 911 emergency operator who tries to alert authorities and maintain contact with his desperate caller, a kidnapped wife being driven God knows where.
A remake of the award-winning 2018 Danish film of the same name, “The Guilty” puts Gyllenhaal front and center for 90 minutes as 911 dispatcher Joe Woods.
It immediately becomes clear
Joe is not your usual 911 responder. No Mr. Nice Guy. He’s rude, he lectures, he’ll even hang up.
“Yeah,” Gyllenhaal said in a Zoom interview, “there’s a real toxicity to him. From the beginning, he’s pushing people, saying things he shouldn’t. It’s not his job, right?”
Joe, we learn, is a cop put on this desk job while an abuse case is investigated. That’s a departure from the original.
“Immediately upon transposition into America and then to Los Angeles, it just set a different tone,” Gyllenhaal said. “A tone of the world collapsing around this character, like Dante’s Inferno.”
“The Guilty” Gyllenhaal sees as speaking to, “the whole issue of Joe and his daughter, Joe coming to terms with his own truth emotionally.”
Despite its escalating tension, don’t call this a one-man show. “We shot this in 11 days at the height of COVID so it was just inherently tense.
“We shot 20 pages a day with 20- to 30-minute-long takes that are very highly choreographed with the cast assembled on Zoom from different parts of the world.”
They range from Riley Keough as the distraught mother and Peter Sarsgaard as her disturbed husband to Ethan Hawke, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Paul Dano.
“I was most worried about who we would cast as these calls that came in. Because performance,” Gyllenhaal explained, “is really about listening.
“As any actor would tell you, Rule No. 1 with acting is: You need to listen, which becomes harder, not just for actors, over time.
“These great actors agreed to do it in this period of time and every call that came in was just so alive. All the calls are live phone calls (none pre-recorded), which made my job pretty easy. I just really had to listen.
“And, yeah, there were definitely moments that were hard. Technical things. But I never really looked at it like it was a one-man show. I looked at it like, there are all these incredible performances going on around me.”