Summary
- Jake Gyllenhaal's intense preparation led to the sudden cancellation of the film Suddenly, resulting in a $26 million loss.
- Gyllenhaal's erratic behavior during pre-production included odd requests.
- Director Thomas Bidegain eventually made a smaller-budget version of Suddenly in 2023.
Jake Gyllenhaal is one of the most intense actors working today. He's not afraid to change his appearance or spend tremendous amounts of time off-screen to refine the nuances and the backstory of a given character to get it just right. It has yielded great results, as evidenced by the fact that he's an Oscar nominee, but it can sometimes prove too much.
Gyllehaal was slated to appear in the adventure drama Suddenly opposite Vanessa Kirby, but the film was shut down under seemingly mysterious circumstances. A feature published in the French outlet Technikart, however, posited that Gyllenhaal's intense preparation and desire to meddle with the production was what ultimately doomed the film (and its budget).
Jake Gyllenhaal Was Accused Of Purposely Tanking The Production Of The Film Suddenly
Suddenly was first announced in December 2021. Jake Gyllenhaal and Vanessa Kirby were set to play a couple who were trapped on an island in the South Atlantic, and are forced to rely on their wits for survival. It's an intriguing premise, and one that seemed perfectly suited for its stars to deliver strong performances.
Unfortunately, production never happened. The aforementioned Technikart feature revealed that the film was halted during pre-production due to Gyllenhaal's erratic behavior and desire to take the story in directions that were not previously agreed upon.
There was a laundry list of requests that Gyllenhaal made during the pre-production process, including:
- Having his character rewritten to be a military veteran
- Adding a sequence in which his character slaps a fish
- Insisting that his character's rental car be red or white
- Introducing a "Pepe Le Pew" accent during table reads
The erratic behavior didn't stop there. The Technikart feature, which included interviews with various crew members, alleged that Gyllenhaal stripped down to his underwear at one point, and decided to go for a swim in the freezing ocean.
The film's director, Thomas Bidegain, recalled having Zoom meetings with Jake Gyllenhaal and Vanessa Kirby prior to getting out on location in Iceland, and prepping a much different version of the story than the one Gyllenhaal decided to go with:
"When we started reading the script in the same room, we realized that we didn’t have at all the same vision of what the film was meant to be."
The actor's behavior proved to be too much for the director and the studio financing the film, and the plug was ultimately plugged on Suddenly, resulting in a staggering $26 million loss.
Suddenly Lost $26 Million Despite Jake Gyllenhaal Being Listed As A Producer
Jake Gyllenhaal was listed as a producer on Suddenly, and given that he was the most famous person involved with the production, he had an unusual amount of power. The crew told Technikart that Gyllenhaal tried to utilize his power by making changes to the screenplay that neither co-star Vanessa Kirby nor director Thomas Bidegain agreed with.
As the title of the aforementioned Technikart feature, "4 days to bury a film", suggests, the decision was quickly made to shelve the film. Bidegain told the outlet that he had grown so tired of the disagreements over character and theme that he felt it would better to simply pull the plug on Suddenly:
"They wanted more and more changes. I tried to smooth things over once, twice — and then I just realized it wasn't going to work out, so it had to stop."
Things reportedly got so frigid between Gyllenhaal and Kirby that the latter approached Bidegain and tried to purchase the rights to the screenplay so that she could produce it with different collaborators. Bidegain refused, and the film was ultimately scrapped, leading to the aforementioned $26 million price tag.
The reason that so much money was lost, despite the film never officially going into production, is because work had already been done on the locations and sets. The set on which most of the action would take place was being constructed on a whaling facility, and exterior locations had been scouted and had permits secured when the film was shut down.
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Studio Canal issued a statement after Suddenly was canceled, claiming that they had plans to continue their creative partnerships with Bidegain and Gyllenhaal despite the on-set problems:
"Creative differences are very normal, if unfortunate, regularities in film development. We remain deeply committed to our working partnerships."
The Director Eventually Made Suddenly With A Smaller Budget And Different Actors
Jake Gyllenhaal has not spoken publicly about the disastrous pre-production of Suddenly, but director Thomas Bidegain has been frank about the film's problems with outlets.
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When asked whether he held Gyllenhaal solely accountable for the film being scrapped, the director stated that the cultural differences between American and French was another issue:
"It’s a very strange experience when you work with an actor-producer who doesn’t have the same vision [as] the director. In France, the director is the one in charge."
Bidegain got the chance to redeem himself in 2023, when he rewrote the screenplay for Suddenly and released it in his native France.
The budget was cut down, and the characters that were originally supposed to be played by Gyllenhaal and Vanessa Kirby were played by Gilles Lellouche and Melanie Thierry, respectively.
Bidegain has voiced regret over the way he handled the pre-production of the original film, but maintains a sense of humor about the fact that it cost him the biggest budget of his career. At least, what would have been the biggest budget of his career had it worked out.
The director theorized that Gyllenhaal was looking for a more confrontational and free-form environment, but that ultimately, his vision of the film did not mesh with the actor's:
"With [Jake], maybe I wasn't firm enough, but I don't work like that. Anyway, it's all over, and the $26 million fly away!"
It's nice to know that the careers of everybody involved have rebounded, even if some were more to blame for what went wrong than others.
