What movie did Jake Gyllenhaal get famous for? Films, TV shows and awards

Jake Gyllenhaal’s latest movie Road House, an update of the 1989 action film starring Patrick Swayze, was released in March and has already clocked over 50 million views on Prime Video. Gyllenhaal plays Dalton, an ex-UFC fighter, haunted by his past and down on his luck until he is offered a job as a bar doorman in the Florida Keys.

Gyllenhaal’s fistfight with Conor McGregor

Gyllenhaal and co-star Conor McGregor both give electrifying performances in the Doug Liman-directed remake with both gaining acclaim from the critics, with one noting: “From End of Watch to Ambulance and The Covenant, Gyllenhaal has frequently proved how good he is in action movies, and he’s typically watchable as the world’s most notorious fighter”.

He has shown he is versatile enough to play a multitude of different characters. Gyllenhaal started to get himself known in 2001 when he landed the lead role in Donnie Darko, playing a high school kid diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia whose meds give him nightmarish hallucinations. He has a lucky escape, cheating certain death when a jet engine crash lands on his bedroom - by chance, he is out sleepwalking on the local golf course.

Gyllenhaal hits the jackpot with ‘Brokeback Mountain’

The 43-year-old has had a lengthy career, spanning over three decades. He made his acting debut aged 10, as Danny Robbins, one of Billy Crystal’s kids in the 1991 Western comedy City Slickers. He made a number of short appearances during his teenage years, in movies such as Homegrown (1998) and October Sky (1999) but his big break came in 2005 when he starred as Jack Twist in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, an adaptation of Annie Proulx’s 1997 novel.

The film is based on a short story by Annie Proulx published in New Yorker magazine in October 1997. Set in the early 1960s, it tells the tale of rodeo rider Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) - two high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects who are hired to herd sheep on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming for the summer. They forge relationship will develops, deepens then is eventually consummated.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote of the film and the lead actor, “Jack, played by Gyllenhaal, whose performance, along with his presence in Sam Mendes’s forthcoming Gulf war movie Jarhead, shows that he has “matured into one of the most charismatic actors of his generation”.

During his 35-year career, Gyllenhaal has appeared in 46 movies, produced five and was the executive producer and played the lead role as police officer Brian Taylor in the 2012 thriller End of Watch. Yet it was his performance as Louis ‘Lou’ Bloom a freelance cameraman of dubious morals in Dan Gilroy’s psychological thriller, Nightcrawler that ranks as his best display with Rotten Tomatoes: “Restless, visually sleek, and powered by a lithe star performance from Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler offers dark, thought-provoking thrills. When he catches the eye of a shopworn news director (Rene Russo), Lou goes to increasingly greater lengths to catch the ‘money shot’”.

What is Jake Gyllenhaal’s net worth?

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Gyllenhaal has a net worth of $80 million. In 2017, he bought a 2,868 square feet condo in New York City for $8.63 million. For nine years, he also owned a ranch in Hollywood Hills which he purchased for $2.5 million in 2005 and sold for $3.5 million in 2014.

Another outlet, Showbizgalore, claims that Gyllenhaal earns an annual salary of $3,384,624. He also commands high fees as a celebrity public speaker for which he charges from $100,000 to $1 million.

As for awards and industry accolades, he has once been nominated for an Oscar - as Best Supporting Actor in Brokeback Mountain in 2006 but picked up a host of awards elsewhere for that performance, including two MTV Movie & TV Awards (Best Performance and Best Kiss), National Board of Review Awards (Best Supporting Actor), Best Actor in a Supporting Role at the British Academy Film Awards and a Desert Palm Achievement Award at the 2005 Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards.

His portrayal as the ruthless, obsessed Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler earned him the Best Actor award at both the 2014 Dublin Film Critics’ Circle Awards and 2014 Georgia Film Critics Association Awards and saw him nominated for a Golden Globe in 2015 which ended up going to Eddie Redmayne.