It was on the set of 2005’s “Brokeback Mountain,” in which the actress
played the neglected wife to Gyllenhaal’s smitten cowboy, and they were
filming a steamy tryst in the back seat of a car.
“Jake had touched me everywhere except my boob,”
says Hathaway, patting her chest as the pair sits together to discuss
their new film, the upcoming romantic dramedy “Love & Other Drugs,”
which opens in theaters Wednesday. “We did it very methodically: I
would cover, they’d bring me a towel, I’d get out of the car, go behind
a screen and get redressed. All of a sudden I hear a throat clear from
behind the screen. It’s Jake. ‘Ah, Annie, so the thing is, in this
scene, if it was really you and me in the car, I just think that, you
know, ah, can I touch your boob?'”
“And … I don’t think you asked me this time,” says
Hathaway, turning to her screen partner to tease him about his behavior
during the many love scenes they shot for their new project and
laughing uproariously.
“I already asked. Your offer was still good,” Gyllenhaal says with a shrug.
It’s difficult to watch “Love & Other Drugs,” a
film about a young couple struggling to build a relationship in the
mid-1990s, without being struck by the number of times Hathaway and
Gyllenhaal are called upon to bare it all for the cameras. It’s just
not that often that you see two Oscar-nominated actors strip for sex
scenes in a mainstream studio movie.
But the nudity, they insist, was never intended to
be cheap or exploitative, an easy way to lure jaded moviegoers into
theaters — though the movie’s poster captures the actors in playful
buff repose. Instead, it was a purposeful effort on the part of the
actors and co-writer-director
“We wanted to push it,” Gyllenhaal says. “One of
those avenues was when the sheets come off, you don’t cover your
breast, you don’t cover a part of your body after you’ve slept with
someone you’re falling in love with five or six times.”
Adapted from
a charming, rakish bachelor with little career direction who falls into
the go-go days of pharmaceutical sales just as Viagra is turning into a
national phenomenon. Unexpectedly, he falls for Hathaway’s
a free-spirited artist whose recent Parkinson’s diagnosis puts finding
a boyfriend last on her to-do list. As Jamie’s career in the
unregulated world of the drug game takes off, Maggie is chaperoning
trips for senior citizens to
to buy pharmaceuticals on the cheap. (Although Viagra manufacturer
Pfizer is prominently featured in the story, the company was not
involved in the making of the film.)
The fact that the film touched on such au courant
healthcare debate fodder is exactly why Gyllenhaal — an outspoken
progressive who campaigned for
“Love & Other Drugs” also offered Gyllenhaal, 29, the antidote he craved after shooting the high-octane
videogame adaptation “Prince of Persia.” “I was desperate for character
interaction, for scenes that were intimate, where I could spend a lot
of time talking,” Gyllenhaal says. “I loved the action and jumping
around, but I get a different kind of action in this one.”
Gyllenhaal had followed the long-gestating project
for years, but it wasn’t until he read the most current draft of the
screenplay from Zwick and
knew he had to do it. “By the end of the script I was crying,”
Gyllenhaal says. “I thought, ‘This is it, I will do anything to do this
movie.’ It just moved me from the start. Then I had to convince Ed.”
Zwick tells a different story, saying he wanted Gyllenhaal all along. Calling from
the Academy Award-winning helmer says, “There were so many aspects of
Jake in a room that I hadn’t seen on film: charm, charisma and wit.
It’s a great thing as a director when you can give audiences a side of
an actor they haven’t yet seen onscreen.”
Hathaway’s response to the script was more reserved.
Daintily sipping tea, the slender actress speaks of a complex character
who could tip into stereotype if not handled correctly. “You take a
look at a young woman with a disease and there is always the fear that
this is going to be the ‘disease of the week’ film,” she says. “I
didn’t want to make that, for obvious reasons.”
Rather, Hathaway, who spent time with Parkinson’s patients and neurologists and read
reconcile the psychological trauma that accompanies the diagnosis with
this seemingly liberated artist’s bohemian approach to life.
“I wanted to find a way to have a girl who was
free-spirited, intelligent, sexually unencumbered,” she says. “But I
thought it would be very easy to take all those things I just described
and turn her into a male fantasy. I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted
to relate to her as a woman, and I wanted girls to relate to her too.”
Before filming began, she, Gyllenhaal and Zwick
spent weeks rehearsing, a process that altered the story line from what
Gyllenhaal calls “a guy who changes because he falls in love with a
girl” to a story “about two people being changed by love.”
Of course, Zwick and company are attempting to
breathe life into a genre that’s been gasping for air for some time. In
the last few months, some of the leading rom-com stalwarts of our age —
films as “Eat Pray Love,” “The Switch” and “Life as We Know It.” More
recently,
News” update “Morning Glory” into a hit, despite a relentlessly perky
performance that received warm critical notices.
It’s telling too that every studio in town initially
turned down the project, even after Gyllenhaal and Hathaway had signed
on. It was only after the actors and Zwick agreed to cut their fees
that Fox 2000 greenlighted the
As for that shot on the movie’s racy poster, it
originally was a threesome, with Zwick in the center — he had asked
Hathaway and Gyllenhaal to take the photo as a souvenir of their work
together but his image was removed thanks to the magic of Photoshop.
“As usual, the director gets cut out,” he joked.
Hathaway, who recently completed another romantic comedy, “One Day,” based on the bestselling novel by British author
says she now wants a break from the genre. “I don’t want to focus on
romance for a while,” said Hathaway. “I think I’ve exhausted that
muscle.”
The striking brunet says she’s ready to conquer
other worlds; in fact, she says she’s just a little bit envious of
Gyllenhaal’s most recent job, on the upcoming sci-fi movie “Source
Code,” with
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