Jake Gyllenhaal Tells AD About That Mural Outside Sea Wall/A Life on Broadway
This summer in New York, if you break loose from the sweltering crush of Times Square and turn down 45th Street, half a block toward 6th Avenue, you’ll be met by a wall of faces—and, among them, Jake Gyllenhaal's. A jumbo checkerboard of black-and-white headshots—more than a hundred larger-than-life subjects, captured in poses of gleeful abandon—covers the rear façade of the Hudson Theater. Inside the building, Sea Wall/A Life is in its third week on Broadway, earning love notes from drama critics for its stripped-down set of monologues about the duality of life and death as recounted by two young fathers.
Among the portraits outside, on the second row from the bottom is where you'll find the stars of the show, Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge. Two weeks ago they helped with the installation, pasting each other’s likenesses onto the wall. The mural, by French artist and activist JR, is called Inside Out. JR has become something of a celebrity since the 2017 documentary Faces Places, in which he traveled the French countryside, building portrait installations and an unlikely friendship with film director Agnès Varda, who died in March of this year at age 90. He is known for gigantic photo murals in unexpected locales—such as the enormous eyes that gazed out from the walls of the Seine in Paris in 2009, or the massive baby towering over the U.S. southern border wall in Tecate, Mexico, in 2017.
Any passersby who saw Gyllenhaal toiling away a few weeks ago, in a white T-shirt and baseball cap, pasting and ironing out creases in the faces on the wall, should know that the actor’s involvement was hardly an afterthought. It was at Gyllenhaal’s request that JR came to New York to make Inside Out. In an email, the actor explains to Architectural Digest why he pursued the self-described “photograffeur” for the project. “I first met JR before I knew his work and was struck by what a kind, enthusiastic, and engaged human being he was,” Gyllenhaal writes. During a visit to his studio, the Velvet Buzzsaw star saw JR hard at work on a larger-than-life print of an "enormous set of beautiful eyes," he says, and he was sold.
"His art is messy and imperfect and demands us to look at ourselves, to forgive ourselves, to be kind with each other. It allows us to be vulnerable and feel part of a whole; it makes us feel big and loved at the same time," says Gyllenhaal, which is precisely why the Oscar nominee thought a JR mural would be the perfect complement to the play, which doesn't shy away from breaking the fourth wall and involving the audience. "[Sea Wall/A Life] is about being human and alive—encompassing all its messy comedy and tragedy. In our show we are speaking directly to you, our audience.… I believe JR’s work deals with similar themes. We are simultaneously the art and the observers.”
It’s true that somehow, in seeing our silly mugs magnified onto the walls of grand buildings and bustling city streets, we are reminded of our impermanence, because we recognize, fleetingly, what it’s like to be part of something more permanent. JR’s work exposes our images to the world on a grander scale, when we often feel so small and invisible. In Sea Wall/A Life (which was written by Nick Payne and Simon Stephens), Gyllenhaal and Sturridge give voice to common yet transformative human experiences: the death of a parent, the birth of a child. Their performances cement transient moments and private emotions into the record of public memory, and expose them on a grander scale.
“Sea Wall/A Life isn’t a play about our systems and how we fit or don’t fit in them. It is a human expression about how our lives are impermanent and imperfect and how we struggle to love, but that in the end, love is everything,” Gyllenhaal says. “We experience deep joy, deep pain in our lifetimes. Our lives are filled with exponential variations of experiences. We live. We die. We are outlived by buildings, cities, systems, but we live on in those things, as well. JR is commenting on the idea of our inevitable impermanence all over the world, and it is an honor to share in the soup of those themes with him.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
