Getting his just deserts

Last updated at 10:15 09 July 2004


Jake Gyllenhaal has landed one of the hottest roles in Hollywood - as the star of Sam Mendes's movie about the first Gulf War.

The 23-year-old actor's edgy performance in sci-fi film The Day After Tomorrow (which has taken half a billion dollars globally) proved he could turn in a good performance in a summer blockbuster as well as cool independent pictures, such as cult hit Donnie Darko.

Not only that - he and girlfriend Kirsten Dunst are one of the film world's 'coolest' couples.

Indeed, Kirsten is enjoying her own success as Mary Jane in Spider-Man 2. Jake will start working with Sam on Jarhead next month, with the White Sands national park in New Mexico standing in for the Saudi Arabian desert.

The film is based on a book by Anthony Swofford, a former U.S. Marine Corps sniper. It follows him as a teenage army recruit through basic training and then to the pre-Desert Storm mobilisation in Saudi Arabia, and finally into Kuwait.

When I spoke to Sam about his plans for Jarhead, he told me: "The names Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Saddam Hussein and George Bush (senior) are studded through this book, and you can't be unaware that some things haven't changed."

He said that the film would be as much about loyalty and friendship as it is about warfare. Swofford's book brilliantly captures the hell of war, but also soldiers' black humour.

The author tells how infantrymen watched movies about the Vietnam War, such as Apocalypse Now, and then mouthed lines from those films on their own, very real, battlefield.

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