Offerings #4: I found out about Jake Gyllenhaal

Did you know about Jake Gyllenhaal? I didn’t!

Last week, I won two rush tickets to see Othello starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal on Wednesday at 2pm — yes, I’m unemployed. I entered the lottery because clips of Denzel loving Shakespeare always surfaced on my timeline and Othello is one of the few Shakespeare plays I hadn’t seen or read. 

In the 24 hours from when I won the tickets to when I sat in our partial view box at the Barrymore Theater, I neglected to tell my friends that Jake starred in it because I did not care. For years I did not care. I did not care that he inspired “All Too Well,” a song I used to feel special for liking before I realized its specificity resonated with everyone. I did not care that he was Kaitlyn Tiffany’s muse for her brilliant newsletter, “Our Bodies Are Controlled By The Moon.” I did not care so much that I turned off Love And Other Drugs in college.

What I missed in all the conversation about Jake is that he’s a really good actor?! 

I can’t speak to the nuances of the adaptation of Othello, but the staging was stiff and Denzel didn’t shimmer as Othello the way I expected him to, so Jake’s Iago held my entire focus. When his shaved head graced the stage, I was so in it that I threw up my hands in frustration with his conniving ways and shot exasperated looks at my boxmate. 

Jake’s performance as Iago was so intense that he made the most bizarre choices of the production like his American army uniform … in Venice … work. He modernized the villain by bringing a quality of the masculinity currently wreaking havoc to his stature and delivery. At moments he shifted into the Blaccent white men love to appropriate and his commitment to ruining a woman’s life to gain power had touches of a red-pilled incel.

A star was there this whole time and I had no idea! It’s fun to invest in someone and to watch their weird movies — my library hold on Nocturnal Animals just came through, yippee! And I know, I know his dating history probably makes him a bad person. But he’s also … a ridiculous person. 

I beg you to read Architectural Digest’s visit to his Othello dressing room. It brought tears to my eyes. It’s so self-serious and insane. 

He hired designers to decorate his dressing room to be “narrative-driven, but also something that would be very comfortable for him that he could retreat into.” It includes a handmade chess set that represents the “calculated gameplay” of Iago with wooden dark and light chairs that “align with the themes of racial dichotomy underpinning the tale.” 

Jake’s dressing room doesn’t just reference the themes of Othello, but also its setting of Venice. His design team included Venetian glassware and wallpaper displaying blown up photographs of Venice. “Subtley, though, was key…” claims AD. 

To satisfy your curious minds, one lamp in the room cost $9,200 and two chairs — not the racial ones — cost $18,000. 

“I would never claim to try and be a dramaturge here, but I do think the materials that [the designers] picked — both soft and tough, the danger, and the comfort — all these juxtapositions are very, very right for the themes of Othello,” Jake told AD. I would never claim to try and be a dramaturge here. I would never claim to try and be a dramaturge here…

Enough with relatability! Give me someone with a “method dressing room.” Be a fantastic actor and a freak. Sometimes celebrities are so modest and boring. I’m happy to see there’s at least one actor out there still living up to his name.

RACHEL ZEGLER ROCKS: Variety published a hit piece blaming Rachel Zegler’s anti-Trump, pro-Palestine politics for the live-action Snow White’s box-office flop. The piece aims to vilify Zegler, but to any sane reader it both reveals evil machinations of studios and spotlights Zegler’s resoluteness in the face of censorship and racist harassment.

After Zegler tweeted, “and always remember, free palestine” Marc Platt, the film’s producer and father of Ben Platt, flew to New York to ask her to delete it, but she refused. After Trump’s election she posted “Fuck Donald Trump” and “may Trump supporters never know peace” on Instagram. Platt again asked her to delete her posts and she refused. Eventually she agreed to work with a “social media guru” to vet posts before the film’s release. 

The story of course fails to acknowledge the racist harassment Zegler faced for being Latina and playing Snow White or the elephant in the room, it’s a bad movie, or so I hear. 

The studio response to Zegler’s social media posts reminds me of how executives now want their stars to have a certain number of social media followers — which I wrote about in Altar Boys previously — but studios don’t want stars to share anything they believe. You can’t have it both ways! Variety’s piece ultimately backfired, making us privy to the closed-door conversations and repression at play in Hollywood. 

THE CLIP ECONOMY IS COMING FOR BOOKS: Simon & Schuster is coming out with a webseries Bookstore Blitz where participants get $100 and five minutes to go on a bookstore shopping spree. It’s part of Sean Manning’s, the imprint’s new publisher, strategy of reaching nonreaders. He’s also launching Read Carpet, an awards-focused interview series, at the National Book Critics Circle Awards. “My hope is that inevitably [Bookstore Blitz] could be a promotional stop like Chicken Shop Date or Hot Ones,” Manning told The Cut. 

MATT AND BEN BY MINDY KALING LIVES ON: Matt Damon is mentioned Ocean’s eleven times in GQ’s latest profile of Ben Affleck. The conversation goes back to the premise for Mindy Kaling’s play about the boy best friends — how did Matt and Ben decide who would play Will in Good Will Hunting. On the long-tail effect of their roles Ben said, “Oh, dude, what I didn’t realize when we made that movie was that everybody who saw that movie would more or less assume that we were those characters.” Later he said, “I would’ve taken Saving Private Ryan,” but he wasn’t offered it, Matt was. 

But would he take a cameo in a Jack Harlow music video?

INDULGENCES: MY ALTAR BOYS ONE DIRECTION EDITION

Former Skins cast members, anyone Irish, British actors whose breakout role was “playing gay,” rappers from Kentucky, and men in Ocean’s Eleven (and their codependent best friends) are all fair game.

Parasocial is such an ugly word to describe the beautiful feelings (and friendships) One Direction gave me over the years. On Tuesday, March 25 — famously the day ZAYN left the band ten years ago — he opened his solo show with “Night Changes.” It’s impossible to describe the warmth of watching Zayn embrace One Direction these past couple of years crescendo into this performance. You have to have cared so much and for so long about five boys!

@thetommoway

zayn opening his show with night changes, his first one direction song since leaving 10 years ago today 🥺 #onedirection #1d #nightchanges ... See more

NIALL HORAN released the five year anniversary edition of Heartbreak Weather, my favorite One Direction solo album aside from Harry’s debut. Much ink has been spilled about the five year anniversary of the pandemic, but putting the passage of time in the context of this album stopped me in my tracks. The eponymous song is such an upbeat, hopeful pop song that it transcended being a song I danced to on repeat alone in my room during my virtual final year of college into the soundtrack to my dazzling adult life of runs in Prospect Park and bus rides to Williamsburg. The gem of the anniversary edition is the live version of “Small Talk.” 

Is HARRY STYLES still a person that exists? Just something I’ve wondered about lately.

As always, I’m open to your feedback and suggestions of what to include in Altar Boys. I’m still off social media, so if you see an Altar Boy, say something! Thank you for reading and maybe send this to a friend to subscribe <3