Jake Gyllenhaal received a sweet note from his older sister, Maggie Gyllenhaal, during his Monday appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
At the end of his interview, host Colbert informed Jake, 45, that Maggie, 48, had tucked a piece of paper for him in the couch cushion during her visit on the show the night before to promote their new movie, The Bride!, in which Jake stars and she directs.
“I don’t know what she left you,” Colbert said, as the Oscar-nominated actor unfolded the paper.
“You’re a beast,” the note read. Explaining the meaning behind her three-word message, Jake shared that he once wrote the phrase on Maggie’s dressing room mirror ahead of one of her Broadway shows when she was having a tough time. The two have since made it a tradition to leave the motivational message on each other’s mirrors.
“She’s written it on my mirror every opening night,” the Nightcrawler star explained. Gyllenhaal starred as Iago in a major 2025 Broadway revival of Othello alongside Denzel Washington at the Barrymore Theatre.
“I think that’s part of what her movie is about,” he continued.
“And I think it’s also about all of us seeing that in each other and communally going out together experiencing life, like you would here or like you would at a rock concert, or why you’d go to the movies, to go experience something together and feel that part of yourself.”
The Bride!, out in theaters March 6, stars Jessie Buckley as a murdered 1930s Chicago woman who is brought back to life by a groundbreaking scientist (Annette Bening) to be the wife of Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale). It also features Jake, Penélope Cruz and Maggie’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard.
While Maggie and Jake have co-starred together in several films, including A Dangerous Woman (1993), Homegrown (1998) and Donnie Darko (2001), The Bride! marks their first collaboration as director and actor.
The horror sci-fi is Maggie’s second time in the director’s chair, following her 2021 debut, The Lost Daughter, a psychological drama starring Olivia Colman.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Maggie opened up about her evolving relationship with Jake.
“We’ve never been estranged,” she told the publication, “but we’ve never been as close as we are now. We’re finally, maybe in the last five years, more and more and more, even each day, really interacting, which is hard for people to do.”
Jake was the first to find stardom, something that Maggie admitted was a source of “envy” at the time. “In general, I am very interested in envy,” she mused. “What creates it? I think it’s usually feeling starving, like you don’t have enough.”
But, she added, “there absolutely is enough to go around. But I don’t think I knew that at first, when I was young and Jake was a movie star right away. I don’t think I was in touch with the envy, but it was there.”
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