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Jake Gyllenhaal on how being legally blind has been 'advantageous' to his career

Whether getting ripped for 'Road House,' prepping 'Othello' or pie tasting on date night, the 'Presumed Innocent' star can’t do anything halfway. Now he’s looking to refocus that intensity: “The feeling I want to have is, can I do it?”

When I can’t see in the morning, before I put on my glasses, it’s a place where I can be with myself.” He has used his blindness sometimes to help him as an actor — when he was shooting a difficult scene in the 2015 boxing movie Southpaw, one in which police tell his character that his wife has died, Gyllenhaal removed his contacts to force himself to listen more closely. Gyllenhaal has just flown into Los Angeles after hosting the season finale of Saturday Night Live, an episode in which he fulfilled a childhood dream of performing a Boyz II Men song (“Every car drive, every shower,” he says of his relationship to the ’90s R&B band) and played an unhinged version of Fred, the ascot-wearing cornball from Scooby-Doo. “Out to dinner every night after the show, alive and free and happy.” As a film actor, he started to lean into weirder fare, playing an over-the-top TV host in Bong Joon Ho’s Okja, in a performance that critics either loved (“charmed,” said The Atlantic) or hated (“antic and abrasive,” said The New York Times) but agreed was loose and new, and Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw.

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