Jezebel Investigates: When Did Jake Gyllenhaal Start Wearing a Tiny Gold Chain?

Jake Gyllenhaal—an actor whose swagger has been evident since the Donnie Darko days and no, I’m not taking questions at this time—showed up to the Spider-Man: Far From Home premiere Wednesday night wearing a thin gold chain. According to Page Six, his cool guy look has been met with horny tweets and derision in equal parts, which seems insane because he obviously looks good. (Some examples: “My current sexuality is Jake Gyllenhaal wearing a gold chain” and “Jake Gyllenhaal going full on ‘New Jersey Class Clown’ with this hair and gold chain necklace is an affront I won’t soon forget!!”) Everyone appears to be missing the real point, which is: When did Jake start wearing a chain in the first place?

Surely this is a stylistic detour from the indie starlet who dazzled in Nightcrawler? Or saved lives in The Day After Tomorrow? Or did cowboy stuff in Brokeback Mountain? (I’ll level with you, I’ve never seen that movie but it looks good and so does his mustache.) Jarhead Jake would totally wear a chain for special events, but how similar to his roles is Gyllenhaal, anyway? I’ve decided to investigate.

Gyllenhaal wore the chain while visiting BBC Radio 1 in a video that hit YouTube early Thursday—I’m not sure when this was filmed, but clearly, he’s worn it more than once. Surely that means something?

Last week, Gyllenhaal and Spider-Man himself, my son Tom Holland, paid a visit to The Graham Norton Show to promote the forthcoming Marvel flick. Most of the bits centered around Holland, but the star was obviously Gyllenhaal’s necklace, which didn’t receive as much as a throwaway line. A missed opportunity if I’ve ever seen one:

See?

So he’s owned the chain for at least seven days. Now we’re getting somewhere.

My next step was looking through Getty Images for a shot of Jake wearing the chain. While I appreciate that my job often boils down to “looking at pictures of hot people,” it became clear that I wasn’t getting any answers. If he was wearing a chain in any recent press pics, they’ve been obscured by a handsome polo or jean jacket. I needed to go to the source. I needed to find obsessive fan accounts, and scroll. I turned to Instagram’s Jake Gyllenhaal Daily… and got nowhere. I examined Jake Gyllenhaal FF, the Twitter account for the Jake Fan Forum, with the same result. I looked through his official Instagram, too, not expecting anything… and got exactly that. Nada. Truly, if Gyllenhaal has been wearing his chain for a while, it’s not public knowledge.

And just when I was about to give up, I remembered another photo database, Backgrid. And that’s when I saw it—a photo of Jake, taken on May 9, 2019. He’s wearing a modest gray sweater and the infamous chain while entering the Jimmy Kimmel Live! studio in Hollywood. It’s official. He’s had the jewelry for at least a month, and we’re all idiots for failing to notice:

There it is, in all its glory. But when did he receive it? I doubt someone handed it to him that day. What kind of stylist would reveal something some wondrous so nonchalantly? The world may never know the tiny chain’s origin, but I will not rest until there are answers. At the very least, I am happy to have another Jake inquiry to expend energy on after the great Jake doesn’t know how to hold a dog controversy of 2015:

Jezebel has reached out to representatives for Gyllenhaal and will update this post if we hear back about the chain.