Ambulance star Jake Gyllenhaal: Drinking canal water is just part of the job

SINGAPORE - Jake Gyllenhaal has discovered that one of the sacrifices an actor has to make for authenticity is gulp water from a city canal.

In the action-thriller Ambulance, his character, bank robber Danny, is in a getaway vehicle racing along the Los Angeles River, a concrete channel that carries run-off from the metropolis and surrounding agricultural areas.

The film is showing in cinemas.

As the getaway ambulance speeds over the shallow waterway, it throws off magnificent plumes on either side, as director Michael Bay had intended.

Gyllenhaal, 41, had to lean out to fire shots at pursuing police choppers. This placed his body in the spray zone. In take after take, he was drenched in foul city effluent.

"The water was spraying in my face so much, I must have drunk gallons of it. Shooting in the LA River was a highlight for us, with the exception of that part," he says with a rueful smile.

The American actor (Brokeback Mountain, 2005; Nightcrawler, 2014) was speaking to the press at an online conference.

A large amount of screen time is set inside the vehicle of the film's title.

Bank robbers Danny and William (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) have hijacked it, holding paramedic Cam Thompson (Eiza Gonzalez) and an unconscious wounded policeman hostage. Inside the cramped truck, the three main characters fight for survival.

One thing the actor realised about ambulances is that they appear spacious only on the outside.

"I've seen them pass by me many times and, from the exterior, they look big," he says. Inside, much of the space is taken by medical equipment, leaving only the bare minimum for paramedics.

"We had to shoot a movie inside that space over a number of months and it became really difficult to move around," he says. The discomfort gave him new-found respect for emergency medical personnel, for whom that cramped space is their day-to-day reality.

"To drive it through traffic and keep someone alive in it - it's mind-blowing that it happens," he says.

His co-star, Abdul-Mateen, 35, is seated next to Gyllenhaal at the conference and reacts with mock horror to the actor's account of the LA River scenes. His character William, Danny's adoptive brother, is driving the ambulance and gets sprayed too.

"I was trying to push that experience out of my mind, you brought it back up and now I have to suppress it again," says the American actor, whose star has been rising recently from his appearances in the Emmy-winning HBO fantasy miniseries Watchmen (2019) and science-fiction film The Matrix Resurrections (2021).

While Abdul-Mateen and Gyllenhaal now live in New York City, both have resided in Los Angeles and are familiar with landmarks shown in the film, such as the Los Angeles Convention Centre and the tangle of highways around it.

Abdul-Mateen's William is a law-abiding ex-soldier living in a middle-class LA neighbourhood. Desperate for a way to pay his wife's crushing medical bills, he turns to Danny for a loan, but is persuaded to join Danny's heist crew after his brother flaunts his expansive garage filled with luxury cars.

LA is where the poorest neighbourhoods are a stone's throw from gated mansions. The juxtaposition creates tensions, says the actor.

"LA is a city with a Skid Row and Beverly Hills. As I was driving home after filming, within 20 minutes, you can see it, right in your face. The financially less fortunate can always see something they desire - or something to feel left out of," he says.

Ambulance is showing in cinemas.