Swifties, gird your loins: Jake Gyllenhaal has responded to All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version).
While we’d implore the generically hot white men that Taylor Swift has dated and subsequently written songs about to opt out of publicly commenting, Gyllenhaal took the bait that Esquire threw his way and waded into the discourse. The actor, who turned off his Instagram comments during the apex of the chatter but has remained mum otherwise, told Esquire that the song “has nothing to do with me.”
“It’s about her relationship with her fans,” he said. “It is her expression. Artists tap into personal experiences for inspiration, and I don’t begrudge anyone that.”
Now, look, I’ve seen Gyllenhaal at speaking engagements for films before and he’s one of those dudes that uses the word “craft” a lot about acting so this whole sidebar on artistry entirely tracks. He respects the art!!!
For those who have been living under a rock, Swift wrote the original All Too Well for her 2012 album Red, and it was widely known to be about her fling with Gyllenhaal. Amid her ongoing project of rereleasing all of her albums, she dropped her newer, extended version of Red in November 2021 which featured the 10-minute version of All Too Well. Few could forget the moment when the song dropped, which rolled out even more nittier, grittier details of the ill-fated romance, but Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram all but solidified that Gyllenhaal wasn’t escaping any part of the hubbub if he tried.
Upon being asked about how the online response to the song has been for him, Gyllenhaal became deadly serious and started talking about *gestures wildly*: “At some point, I think it’s important when supporters get unruly that we feel a responsibility to have them be civil and not allow for cyberbullying in one’s name. That begs for a deeper philosophical question. Not about any individual, per se, but a conversation that allows us to examine how we can—or should, even—take responsibility for what we put into the world, our contributions into the world. How do we provoke a conversation? We see that in politics. There’s anger and divisiveness, and it’s literally life-threatening in the extreme.”
He went on to ponder life’s meaning (“My question is: Is this our future? Is anger and divisiveness our future? Or can we be empowered and empower others while simultaneously putting empathy and civility into the dominant conversation? That’s the discussion we should be having.”) before claiming that he has not listened to Red.
Nice try, bud. You def listened.