Jake Gyllenhaal Hated His Parents for Making Him Turn Down ‘Mighty Ducks’

Jake Gyllenhaal promotes ‘Southpaw’ on SiriusXM’s 'Town Hall’ earlier this week. (Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM)

Jake Gyllenhaal still remembers how devastated he was when his parents made him turn down a lead role in The Mighty Ducks. At age 11, the actor had just gotten his big break playing Billy Crystal’s son in 1991’s City Slickers. But when Disney offered him the part of Charlie Conway the 1992 hockey comedy — which would have involved missing months of school — his mom and dad put their collective foot down. (The Mighty Ducks character was ultimately played by future Dawson’s Creek star Joshua Jackson.)

“I definitely remember crying on the kitchen counter,” the Southpaw star said yesterday on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show. (Listen to the clip here.) “But my parents were like, ‘Look, you’re about to enter junior high school, you gotta get your education, that’s the most important thing. I promise you, you hate us now, but you’ll thank us later.’ And I do.”

In retrospect, Gyllenhaal says he appreciates that he got a few years to be a normal kid. He also says he worries about other child actors — like his Southpaw co-star, 12-year-old Oona Laurence, who plays his daughter in the movie. “I see her, and I go, ‘I want her to have a normal life,’” he says. ‘I want her to have her family and her friends and be in that space, because I think that will grow her up for real. I think all that movie stuff is meant more for adults, and I think it can mess you up.”

One of the many weird things about being in movies, Gyllenhaal told Stern, is awards season. Though he says he doesn’t particularly care about winning accolades, he admitted that his Brokeback Mountain Oscar nomination freaked him out. The morning of the awards ceremony, said the actor, “I remember actually I was so nervous before that I had gone on a hike with my dog and I got poison ivy all over my arms. So I’m sitting there [at the Oscars], scratching my arms.” While Gyllenhaal didn’t prepare a speech (since he correctly suspected he would lose to George Clooney for Syriana), he did rehearse his losing face for when the award was announced. “Oh, absolutely. You practice it in the mirror,” he said. “My publicist, she’s like, ‘No, smile a little less, a little less, a little more sincere…’”

During the radio show, Stern also got Gyllenhaal to open up a little about relationships. The actor confessed that he’s been in love “three times,” and hopes to get married one day, but has always been “scared” of a lifelong commitment. “There are a lot of beautiful woman. There are opportunities,” he said of his love life. “But I think at the same time, if you find the right person — I believe in monogamy. I believe in, when you meet somebody who’s right, it will be right and you’ll stay there.” By his own admission, one reason he’s avoided marriage is his parents’ relationship; Jake’s mother Naomi Foner and father Stephen Gyllenhaal (also the parents of Jake’s sister Maggie) divorced in 2008 after 30 years of marriage. “I hoped they would [divorce] for many years,” the actor confessed to Stern. “I think everything is a lot better now.”