Yes, Yes, Jake Witnessed a Gang Shooting; Now Let's Tie It to Harry Potter!
It's my running joke (which works only because it's true) that Jake Gyllenhaal is a boring person. The vast majority of the time, his life is about as interesting as anyone else's, which is to say not even remotely interesting enough to write about with anything approaching regularity. Thus my propensity for making shit up.
But last week, two legitimately unusual things happened in the world of Jake: he was a guest on the season premiere of Man vs. Wild, and he witnessed a gang shooting while doing a ride-along with the LAPD as part of his research for his role in End of Watch.
As is likely painfully clear, I offered full coverage of neither event.
My life last week did not include sleeping in a snow cave or cruising by real-life violence in a police car, but it was interesting within the context of me. Some major life shit went down...and of course we had the release of the final Harry Potter film...
I was thinking about all of it as I lay in bed last night, and then I started thinking about this blog and waiting for the guilt that inevitably comes when I realize I haven't posted anything here in a while. When the guilt didn't come, my train of thought shifted to why that was...
Jake was just doing his job last week. When he showed up to Iceland a few months back, he wasn't actually morphing into a survivalist. He was spending 48 hours with a camera crew under the guidance of a trained professional for the sake of making good television (the success of that goal being somewhat under debate). And hanging out with the cops for a day doesn't give him any sort of in-depth appreciation for the harsh realities of making your living on the streets of Los Angeles year after year; it gives him insight into how to pretend well enough to entertain movie-goers who don't know any better.
And I guess that's maybe why these supposedly "interesting" things weren't really all that interesting to me last week.
In a recent interview, Daniel Radcliffe (God bless him) said that one of the things he does to keep himself grounded is remind himself that when he gets out of the car at a premiere, the screaming isn't for him. It's for Harry Potter. Anyone who landed the role of Harry would have gotten those screams. The true power lies in the story, not in his personal appeal.
And isn't that true of every celebrity? I mean, honestly, at the very root of it, don't we applaud the fame above the person himself? Jake's a good-looking guy, but how would you react to running into him if he weren't famous? I'll go out on a limb and say there would be far less shaking and freaking out if instead of acting in movies, he was working behind the counter at Starbucks.
July 15 marked the fifth anniversary (!) of my first post on Jake Watch. That is a long goddamned time. In the past half-decade, I have learned many things (it is, after all, "all about learning"), but one lesson seems to have reared its head over and over and over again. Fame is currency. And at a much more impressionable era in my life, I got swept up by a guy who doesn't know how to spend his very well.
So I apologize for not commenting on the gang shooting thing. But the truth is that I'll always find it more interesting when Jake winds up on an adventure for his own sake, and not for the sake of his audience.
Sort of related...here is DanRad on The Daily Show last night. And no, there is no reason to post this other than it's my blog and I am one of the world's biggest motherfucking Harry Potter nerds. #noshamewhatsoever
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