Perhaps because of that lack of typical movie star entitlement, the woman controlling access to this haute- hippie eatery (where Gyllenhaal celebrated his 24th birthday last December) is only too happy to turn down our request to conduct an interview in the quiet rear garden. In fact, when he delicately mentions he knows the manager and would like to make his case to her, the functionary, with a tsk’ing noise, asks to know his name.

Well, now . . . Whether you want the indie cred of Donnie Darko and The Good Girl or the $187 million domestic box office of The Day After Tomorrow to jog your memory, this would seem to be a recognizable person. Still, the hostess’ s face seems suspiciously, not to say maliciously, squeegeed free of recognition. But when Gyllenhaal’s fellow diner casts him a wry look, he’s quick to mutter, “It’s all right . . . ”

We are ushered to monastic benches in the sedate-looking but howlingly noisy café, and by way of smoothing things out, he looks up with the observation, “I do love the food here. . . . ” A beat. “I may eat a lot.”

At six two, he’s muscular, but so lean he seems a tiny bit bowed, a spinnaker before an imaginary wind. With the ordering done, we spend a few minutes discussing Bruce Springsteen, circa The River album. The Boss’s image was on the cover of a magazine Gyllenhaal used as an onstage prop when playing the dissolute Warren in Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth in his 2002 stage debut in London. Diving into theater in that fashion, he says, was good preparation for the daunting aspects of Brokeback Mountain: “I guess I approached it the only way you can approach such things—like, I didn’t go on the stage on the West End thinking, oh my God, I’m going to be reviewed by every major paper in London in the same week that Vanessa Redgrave is going to be reviewed for her performance [in another play opening simultaneously].”

Gyllenhaal neglects to mention that he won the Evening Standard’s Outstanding Newcomer award over the local transatlantic competition—and perhaps as importantly, was seen by Sam Mendes in the part, leading directly to his being cast in this month’s Jarhead. “I don’t think I had realized until I saw him onstage,” recalls Mendes, “how masculine he was. He’s a big guy, and he has a combination of soulfulness and ‘man of action’ I was looking for. Also, he’s very accessible. His face is accessible. His soul is accessible.”

The translation of star power to box office, though it’s supposedly the last surviving verity in the film industry, is by no means guaranteed these days. But when you add in what are generally acknowledged to be the superior acting chops Gyllenhaal has shown, he’s a bet many prestige directors seem happy to make these days. Joining Lee and Mendes in a year-end trifecta of Gyllenhaal films is John Madden (Shakespeare in Love), who put him in Proof opposite Gwyneth Paltrow (following a nice run on the London stage, where he’d also directed her in the David Auburn play). “He’s got a very instinctive, unusual, loose kind of talent,” says Madden, who cast him in the part written for a slightly older actor.

At a certain stage in Proof, notes Madden, Gyllenhaal’s character, Hal, fails to do the right thing, in the eyes of the audience as well as Paltrow’s tormented Catherine: “One of the qualities that one’s grateful for in Jake is that he’s extraordinarily appealing even when he’s doing something that is such an immense disappointment. It’s quite important to have an actor who doesn’t immediately forfeit the audience’s sympathy . . . obviously the story is on the side of Catherine, but it’s an interesting balance of where the audience awards their sympathy at a given moment.