Why Jake Gyllenhaal threw himself into ‘Bayhem’ and hijacked an ambulance

Jake Gyllenhaal goes big in his portrayal of a volatile ambulance-snatching serial bank robber – and there’s one very good reason for that.

If Jake Gyllenhaal needed any further inspiration for his volatile, shouty, “inches-away-from-his-head exploding” character in Ambulance, he didn’t need to look any further than the man behind the camera.

In the heist-action-thriller directed by Michael Bay, Gyllenhaal plays Danny Sharp, a serial bank robber who drags in his down-on-his-luck, war veteran adoptive brother Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) to pull off a big score.

When the robbery goes south they attempt to escape by hijacking an ambulance carrying a wounded cop and the plucky paramedic desperately trying to keep him alive.

It’s fair to say that the Oscar-nominated star of Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac and Spider-Man: Far From Home goes big in his portrayal of the charismatic but crazed career criminal Danny, dialling the volume up to 11 and veering off script as the brothers careen around the streets and freeways of Los Angeles with the cops hot on their tail.

“I take a lot of energy from the filmmaker that I work with and sometimes the characters do mimic their energy or the things they are doing,” says Gyllenhaal, with a grin.

“And though Danny has different intentions than Michael Bay, sometimes the volume with which he speaks is very similar.”

It’s also fair to say that Bay’s reputation precedes him.

Ever since he exploded from the world of television commercials with his 1995 debut hit Bad Boys, he has almost become a genre in his own right.

Director Michael Bay with that famous megaphone on the set of Ambulance.

Thanks to a string of box office monsters including The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and the Transformers franchise, he has become one of the most financially successful directors in history with a combined box office take in excess of $8.5 billion.

He’s also spawned the term “Bayhem” (described by the Urban Dictionary as “blowing shit up on a large scale, in slow motion and usually at sunset”) and developed a reputation for his unique directing approach, getting right into the thick of the action and barking orders on set with a bullhorn, which may or may not survive its frequent and flagrant use.

While Bay’s movies haven’t often endeared him to the critics, there’s no doubting their style, success and flair and it was all those things that intrigued Gyllenhaal to see for himself.

“I have always wanted to be in a Michael Bay film and know what it was like to make a Michael Bay film,” Gyllenhaal says.

“I have heard so many things about his process and I was looking forward to the bullhorn and the yelling and the bossing people around. Movies, for an actor, are all about being in the director’s mind and I was so fascinated to see what it was like.”

Gyllenhaal, who has worked with directing greats from Ang Lee and Denis Villeneuve to David Fincher, says the experience of shooting Ambulance “was exactly what I thought it would be” but says he was surprised by one thing.

“I didn’t expect him to love actors and what they do as much as he loves explosions and action sequences,” he says.

“And I didn’t expect him to give us as much room as his stuntmen and women and his co-ordinators – but he does.”

Michael Bay directs Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul Mateen II on the set of Ambulance.

Shooting Ambulance on the streets of Los Angeles was something of a homecoming for Gyllenhaal.

Though he now lives in NewYork with his Canadian model girlfriend, Jeanne Cadieu, Gyllenhaal was born in the City of Angels into a movie-making family.

His mother Naomi is a film producer, father Stephen is a director, older sister Maggie is also an Oscar-nominated writer, director and actor and he made his acting debut as Billy Crystal’s son in the 1991 comedy City Slickers.

Some of the frantic driving scenes for Ambulance took him back to the streets near where he grew up and on which learned to drive, and one scene in particular transported him to the movies he watched as a teenager with no clue he would go on to become one of the most successful and respected actors of his generation.

One of the key chases involves a face-off between the runaway ambulance and pursuing helicopters on the Los Angeles River – an artificially concreted natural waterway that has featured in beloved movies including Chinatown, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Grease, The Dark Knight Rises and Transformers.

“To think about when we were shooting in the LA River and driving in the LA River and there were helicopters following us and I was shooting a gun out of an ambulance I felt like a kid again,” Gyllenhaal says with a laugh.

Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Danny Sharp (Jake Gyllenhaal) in Ambulance.

“And if I could tell that kid who loved some of those action movies at a young age that he would be doing that on those same streets, I don’t think I would have believed it.”

For all the high-speed chases and high-octane explosions in Ambulance, if there’s one thing that stretches credulity, it is how empty the usually choked streets of Los Angeles are.

The movie was shot during the height of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and while that caused all kind of other challenges around safety protocols it also meant there was next to no traffic on the road.

“It was not advantageous for us as a world but definitely helpful for keeping people safe from the fast-moving vehicles,” agrees Gyllenhaal.

“But there is no place like LA for a car chase.”

It also helps to have Bay at the helm. Ever since hitting the big time with the buddy cop hit Bad Boys, Bay says that law enforcement officers line-up to have their picture taken with him wherever he goes.

The director says he took the Ambulance gig because he was tired of sitting around in his Miami mansion after Covid shut down productions around the world and the fact that there was an existing script and he could shoot in a lean and mean 39 days made it more achievable than his planned next film, Black Five.

On the first day of the shoot with a much-reduced crew to his normally super-sized productions, Bay noticed six California Highway Patrol cars roll up, who had been brought in unbeknown to him for safety reasons.

So, he turned on the charm and put them to work.

“I go right up to them and they wanted to take a picture and I said, ‘OK, great … I would really like to put you in this movie’ and they were like ‘really?’,” Bay says with a laugh.

“To shut down a freeway is about 300 or 400 thousand dollars and it’s a whole to-do. I said to the Highway Patrol guys, ‘What’s it like when you chase an ambulance?’ and they say whatever and I say, ‘Would you do that?’ and they go ‘sure!’.

“So literally they are driving like it’s a real chase with real cars, we’re going 90 miles an hour and I’m like, ‘Could you please shut the freeway down?’ and they go ‘sure!’. So the cars stop and I say, ‘Don’t piss them off too long just keep it for two minutes’. That’s how you get free stuff – do movies they like and you can charm them.”

Ambulance opens in cinemas on Thursday, April 7.