Seth Rogen has opened up about his experience watching Jake Gyllenhaal’s brooding performance on the set of Donnie Darko.
Reflecting on his first-ever film role for The New York Times’ oral history of the 2001 cult classic film, the 44-year-old comedian recalled Gyllenhaal’s approach to the titular character.
“I remember seeing [Gyllenhaal] on set and being like, ‘I don’t know how this is going to land,’” Rogen said in the piece published Monday. “He wasn’t playing this charming version of it.”
But ultimately, Rogen was inspired by what he was seeing. “I remembered thinking he put a level of thought into this that I didn’t even realize, as an actor, was on the table,” Rogen continued.
The Studio star played the small role of bully Ricky Danforth in the sci-fi drama, which was Richard Kelly’s directorial debut. In addition to Gyllenhaal playing the lead troubled teenager, the indie also starred Drew Barrymore, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jena Malone.
Gyllenhaal told the outlet that reading the script’s transition from adolescence into semi-adulthood felt like “a semi-psychedelic journey.”
“[Donnie] was really struggling with enormous feelings that he couldn’t contextualize,” he explained. “I just went, ‘This is what I’m feeling.’ No movie or story had reflected that.”
In the oral history, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the movie, Rogen went on to join his former co-stars in praising Kelly’s script. However, the Knocked Up star said that he had a hard time predicting the film’s quality.
“I remember thinking, ‘This will either be really good, or it’ll be like the weird B-movie of itself,’” Rogen said.
Although Donnie Darko was a box office disappointment upon its release, the film went on to gain a cult following in later years, even inspiring a 2009 film called S. Darko. An official sequel is also coming out in December: a novel written by Kelly called The Philosophy of Time Travel.
Like Gyllenhaal’s performance grew on Rogen, the film has continued to grow on audiences for the past 25 years, as viewers dissect and analyze its twisted plot.
Kelly told The Independent in 2019: “With everything that’s happened in the past decade, I think people are more amenable to disturbing and unusual puzzle-type movies. I think the audience has sort of evolved. Maybe we were just a little bit ahead of the curve?”
Rogen told the Times that the film has stood the test of time because of how it connects with its audience.
“If a thing is good and resonates, it will find its people,” he said. “I think Donnie Darko very much was that.”
Gyllenhaal agreed, saying: “It was a slow burn, and the slow burn has been 25 years long.”
