By The Minute

American actor Jake Gyllenhaal and his concept of time.

- Joie Goh

“TIME, THE RELATIVITY of it, is everything.”

Across the table, a man in a white T-shirt and dishevelled dark hair sits further upright, his deep, soulful eyes earnest beneath a pair of bristly eyebrows. Even at 37 years old, there’s honesty and innocence in the way Jake Gyllenhaal speaks.

“Time is in which moments seem to go by faster than anything, and sometimes time just seems slowed to a halt and you can’t wait,” Gyllenhaal continues. “A lot of it is an internal journey, a lot of it is moving inward, asking questions, taking responsibility for the way we behave, and listening.”

As though on cue, his wristwatch caught the glare of the Los Angeles sunlight streaming into the café, punctuating his point. The slim stainless steel timepiece, the new Santos de Cartier, is the reason we’re here: Gyllenhaal is the new face of the watch, and the first celebrity spokesperson for the house of Cartier.

It’s a role that’s pretty fitting for an actor whose oeuvre includes many films and plays about the concept of time, whether overt or abstract, from his breakout role in the dark sci-fi cult classic “Donnie Darko”, to the disaster blockbuster “The Day After Tomorrow” and his Broadway debut as Roland in Nick Payne’s “Constellations”. Time, to Gyllenhaal, is “an obsession”.

The actor and producer is also sentimental about the keeping of time, even though he professes that he’s not a horological nerd. He still keeps the very first watch he ever owned, a Swiss Army watch that he received from his grandfather upon graduation from high school, as well as a watch that the latter owned himself. “(My grandfather) was a surgeon, and I think about what he did with that watch and the people whose lives he saved when he was wearing (it) too,” he explains.