- Jake Gyllenhaal, who starred in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” said that being in a Marvel film is “hard.”
- Gyllenhaal said he felt pressure to deliver and forgot his line on his first day of filming.
- The actor said he told Tom Holland, “Dude, help me out” and the actor encouraged him to relax.
Jake Gyllenhaal said that he panicked on his first day on the set of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” but costar Tom Holland helped ease his anxiety.
“It’s hard, man,” Gyllenhaal, 40, said of the pressure of being in a Marvel movie during a virtual interview on SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show” on Monday. “That acting is hard. All of it. That world is enormous.”
Gyllenhaal joined the expansive Marvel Cinematic Universe as a villain named Mysterio/Quentin Beck in 2019’s “No Way Home.”
The film was a sequel to “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and marked Holland’s fifth appearance as the titular webslinger from New York.
“It was a train that was already moving,” Gyllenhaal told Stern. “For me, Normally, I come in way early on, and I get to figure it out. It was like, ‘You gotta deliver in that space.’ And it was a whole different craft.”
The Oscar-nominated actor said that on his first day of shooting, he couldn’t remember his line.
“I was the wooden board,” he recalled. “And they were like, ‘Whoa.’ And I went up to Tom Holland and was like, ‘Dude, help me out.’ He was like, ‘It’s all good, man. Just relax.'”
Gyllenhaal added: “It was like he was me in so many situations. And I finally did, but I think I just put a lot of pressure on [myself] because I love that world.”
Jay Maidment/Sony Pictures
Holland shared a similar recollection of Gyllenhaal’s first day back in June 2019 during an appearance on NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”
Holland, who’s used to going off-script and improvising, said that Marvel will sometimes “completely change the lines overnight.”
“You’ll walk in on Monday morning and all of sudden you have a three-page monologue about interdimensional rifts and all this kind of crazy stuff,” the actor said. “So Jake was like, he was like panicking. So I found myself on day one with working with one of my idols like, ‘It’s OK, man. It’s OK. This is just how it goes over here in the Marvel world.’ So it was really weird.”