The movies have always been in Jake Gylle🅘nhaal's blood. Born to a film director father and screenwriter mother, Jake Gyllenhaal has enjoyed a prolific and consistent career in Hollywood. But for all the years and movies he's appeared in, which of🌺 them deserve the accolade as his greatest ever?
More specifically, Jake was born to✅ film director Stephen Gyllenhaal and screenwriter Naomi Foner, and got his early start in movies playing Billy Crystal's son in the 1991 hit City Slickers. But while Gyllenhaal enjoyed a handf✤ul of movie and TV roles in his teen years, his family insisted he work non-acting summer jobs to support himself, which led to jobs as a lifeguard and a restaurant busboy. While Gyllenhaal enrolled in Columbia University, he dropped out to pursue acting full time. In 1999, he landed his first leading role in a movie, which slowly but surely gave him the momentum for a career that's never slowed down.
In celebration of his ongoing career, here are 32 of Jake Gylle꧒nhaal's greatest movies.
32. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)
For a while it was the greate𝐆st movie based on a video game, if only because it was halfway watchable. Based on the video game franchise (and titled after the 2003 hit installment), Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a street urchin turned rogue prince who teams up with a princess (Gemma Arterton) from a rival kingdom to safeguard a mystical dagger that can control time. The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a big and noisy VFX spectacle, and Gyllenhaal's attempt at a Middle Eastern accent is kind of hilarಞious. But there's a charm to the movie that feels reminiscent of classic swashbucklers and sword-and-sandal fantasies like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Conan the Barbarian, and The Mummy.
31. Everest (2015)
Jake Gyllenhaal reaches the mountain peak in Everest, a 2015 survival thriller from Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur and based on the 1996 Mount Everest disaster – still one of the deadliest expeditions ever taken on the fabled mountain. Gyllenhaal stars as real-life mountaineer Scott Fischer, whose years of experience areℱ challenged when a blizzard strikes and his group is left in danger. Everest may not tread unexplored territory, but its stunning cinematography, emotional storytelling, and a strong leading♋ performance by Gyllenhaal, make it a journey worth undertaking.
30. Rendition (2007)
The CIA's ghoulish pr❀actices of extraordinary rendition is taken to task in Gavin Hood's 2007 political thriller. Reese Witherspoon stars as the wife of an Egyptian-born engineer who is detained by American officials due to suspicions of having terrorist links. Gyllenhaal co-stars as Douglas Freeman, a CIA analyst who witnesses the engineer's interrogation and harbors doubt about any involvement. As a politically minded film about America's erosion of ethics in its post-9/11 hysteria, Rendition is kind of sloppy. But Gyllenhaal more than proves his leading man mettle.
29. Moonlight Mile (2002)
Director and writer Brad Silberling takes inspiration from his own life in Moonlight Mile, a beautiful movie about love, loss, and learning to move on. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Joe, a young man still m🌌ourning the death of his fiancé's murder. Staying with his would-be in-laws (played by Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon), Joe tries to move forward while grappling with the lingering emotional obligations 🎶he has to his fiance's parents. In real life, Silberling lived such a story after his girlfriend – the actress Rebecca Schaeffer – was killed by a stalker in 1989.
28. The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Roland Emmerich maintained his status as the premier disaster auteur with 2004's The Day After Tomorrow, an ensemble blockbuster that includes Jake Gyllenhaal. He plays the son of a ౠclimatologist (Dennis Quaid) who is trapped in a suddenly frozen New York City amid an apocalyptic climat☂e event. The Day After Tomorrow is classic Hollywood disaster spectacle mixed with then-groundbreaking visual effects, but an up-and-coming Jake Gyllenhaal is no special effect as the movie's grounded everyman perspective.
27. Proof (2005)
Gwyneth Paltrow wrestles with the burden of genius and inheritance in the moving drama Proof. Paltrow leads the movie as Catherine, the daughter of a celebrated mathematician (Anthony Hopkins) who suffered from severe mental illness before his death. Catherine's father left behind a treasure trove in the form of hundreds of notebooks that chronicle his brilliance; among those after it is a former student (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose relationship with Catherine is complicated by his desire to dive into her father's work. Gyllenhaal isn't the center focus of P🧸roof, but he is a wonderful scene partner for Paltrow in one of her most dramatic roles ever.
26. The Good Girl (2002)
Jennifer Aniston undergoes an existential crisis in The Good Girl, with Jake Gyllenhaal providing a welcome release valve from an unremarkable marriage. The Friends star leads the movie as Justine, a retail store employee who begins a passionate extramarital affair with Holden (Gyllenhaal), a wry young coworker who aims for something more in life. While Justine enjoys the whirlwind of a fling, the harsh realities of life remain in place, and suddenly Holden's dreams feel just like that: dreams. Gyllenhaal is quite f✃unny in a part that is loosely an unofficial Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye.
17. Brothers (2009)
At last, someone in Hollywood took advantage of how much Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire look like siblings. In Jim Sheridan's Brothers (a remake of a 2004 Danish film), Maguire plays a U.S. Marine who returns from Afghanistan with severe PTSD. Returning home, he finds that his younger brother (Gyllenhaal) has become very close to his wife (😼Natalie Portman) and his children in his absence. Brothers is a movie about the limits of brotherly bonds and the destructive power of paranoia that eerily echoed American psychology amid the devastating War on Terror.
9. Stronger (2017)
In addition to the cruel loss of life, the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013 claimed the legs of runner Jeff Bauman, a Boston native who survived the explosion and wrote about his recovery in the memoir Stronger in 2014. In 2017, director David Gordon Green helmed a sincere cinematic ada𝕴ptation of Bauman's book and experiences. A step above your run-of-the-mill inspirational drama, Jake Gyllenhaal gives a stirring performance as Bauman as he struggles in his thru❀st-upon image of a "hero" to the public while suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
