Jake Gyllenhaal hasn't hosted Saturday Night Live since 2007, but last night, he took to Studio 8H to give us a great episode with musical guest Camila Cabello. It all started on a great note with Gyllenhaal's monologue, where he broke down being a "serious" actor and how he wasn't having fun acting, because he was too busy trying to figure out what "method" meant and how it worked for him.
Gyllenhaal brought up his movie Nightcrawler where he lost weight, played a man who becomes a camera-man, and listens to a police scanner to get the perfect shot throughout the movie. But Gyllenhaal pointed out that he tried to go "method" for it and told his director, Dan Gilroy, that he'd lose a bunch of weight and win the Oscar. When that didn't work, he told Gilroy he'd just lose some weight and win the Golden Globe until he admitted that he didn't care about awards.
It's a great monologue and a bit of a call-out against this "method" acting kick because acting is fun. It's a career of make-believe and method acting is, for the most part, filled with people who consistently make working on set impossible for seemingly no reason.
Throughout the monologue though, Gyllenhaal talked about coming back to Saturday Night Live after all these years, even though he had been a part of the John Mulaney musical sketch "Airport Sushi," when Mulaney hosted with musical guest David Byrne. Gyllenhaal showed a picture from his previous hosting gig where he was dressed in a wig and dress and singing with some of the cast. So why not do the same kind of song this time around?
The iconic chords of Céline Dion's "It's All Coming Back To Me Now" started playing and Gyllenhaal pretended as if he couldn't sing and badly carried out the tune. We know Gyllenhaal can sing. He did a stint as Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors, and he was also Georges Seurat in Sunday In The Park With George. He has a beautiful singing voice.
What we didn't expect was how funny it would be having this joke set up and carried through. Even though Gyllenhaal showed the picture at the beginning of his monologue, it was still a great twist by the end, and it set the tone for the rest of the episode in the best of ways!
Check out the monologue here:
httpsI//www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7eIm1GDZFg&feature=youtu.be