I am sorry but Jake Gyllenhaal is entirely too shredded on 'Presumed Innocent'

have a donut, Rusty

I am willing to accept a lot from a movie or television show. I just watched a movie the other day where Godzilla wakes up from a nap inside the Roman Colosseum and starts going around the world sucking up radiation so he can travel to the hollow core of the planet to help King Kong defeat an evil gorilla named The Skar King who controls a monster I would describe as Ice Godzilla — albino lizard who blast frozen beams out of its mouth — using a glowing blue dagger attached to a long rope he made out of the spines he ripped from his enemies. A little girl who communicates with Kong via sign language and vibes finds surviving members of her long-lost tribe in the Hollow Earth and discovers she can communicate with them telepathically. A dude in a Hawaiian shirt flies in and extracts Kong’s infected tooth using a helicopter and a hunch of steel cables. I watched all of that happen and didn’t stop to question any of it for one second. Which is why it’s kind of funny that my brain can’t accept how shredded Jake Gyllenhaal’s character is in Presumed Innocent.

Background, briefly…

Presumed Innocent is an Apple TV series based on a book of the same name by Scott Turow that was also adapted into a movie starring Harrison Ford in the 1990s. Jake plays a guy named Rusty, an overworked prosecutor who ends up on trial for murder when the colleague he was having a secret affair with turns up dead in her home with a crime scene staged to look like a murder they had prosecuted together a few years earlier. Rusty is a mess, stressed out and lying and ambitious and angry and kind of trying to hold together the marriage he is also hellbent on destroying. He is also, as I mentioned earlier, just absolutely ripped. Here, look at this freaking guy.

There are a few arguments to support how jacked he is in this show, which I will address now for the sake of fairness…

ARGUMENT ONE: Sometimes people use exercise as a way to deal with stress. It’s hard to imagine a situation more stressful than “you are on trial for a murder you swear you didn’t commit and also your marriage is hanging by a thread because the victim is someone you were sleeping with and obsessively texting 50 times a day.” There are lots of shots of him swimming and running on the treadmill. We can assume this is a kind of Chidi situation, the thing from The Good Place where an anxious philosophy professor took his shirt off in one episode and revealed a torso that looked like it belonged to a defensive back from a top-tier college football program. It became a whole thing. I wrote about it at the time — apparently “suspiciously jacked TV characters” is a niche of mine — and the show’s creator, Mike Schur, even ended up addressing it in an interview later, saying this: “Our internal logic is that his constant anxiety burns a lot of calories, and also that at some point someone was like, ‘You know, exercise is a good way to alleviate stress,’ and he started doing push-ups and never stopped.”

ARGUMENT TWO: Oh my God, Brian, shut up.

Hmm. Both reasonable points, I guess. But now allow me to make two responses…

RESPONSE ONE: This is purely anecdotal, I admit, but I have met a few stressed-out and overworked lawyers in my life and their body types tend to fall into one of two categories: string bean who isn’t eating and has bags under the eyes or pudgy around the waist and perpetually disheveled. Yes, the show goes to great lengths to give us footage of Rusty working out almost compulsively, but his character isn’t the kind of shredded you get from swimming or jogging a lot. His look is something more like “actor who just filmed a Road House remake where he played a disgraced UFC fighter with rage issues.” Which, yes, actually makes the most sense here. I choose to believe he showed up on set looking like this on day one and the writers — many of whom, also anecdotally, can be stressed-out string beans or anxiety-riddled, carb-inhaling insomniacs themselves — all sighed and rushed back to their Macbooks to add a few dozen exercise scenes to the scripts, just to try to explain why their frazzled murder suspect looks like he walked out of a cologne commercial.

RESPONSE TWO: Hey man, you subscribed to this newsletter. Don’t blame me.

I hope the next episode opens with him stress-eating an entire tray of brownies and finding clumps of his hair in the shower drain. Or meeting Godzilla. Either of those would be more realistic to me than what we’re dealing with now.

STUFF I TYPED

— my House of the Dragon Scorecard for Vulture, in which I finally broke and gave Criston Cole -500 points 

— my Five Spot newsletter, which opens with a section on the warrior rhino in the Gladiator II trailer and also features a terrific update to the LEGO heist story we discussed here a few weeks ago 

STUFF I CLICKED ON

— Albert Burneko crushed this blog about the three essential lawyer movies

— “Who Buys a $150,000 Pet?”

— a good explainer about how people in Philly became obsessed with Twisted Tea

— I revisited this wonderful piece by Mo Ryan about how the television industry is kind of sabotaging itself, which is as true today as it was when she wrote it a few years ago

— the trailer for Agatha All Along looks cool but what it really made me want is a show where Kathryn Hahn and Aubrey Plaza solve murders together

— Beastie Boys are suing Chili’s

— some dork is probably going to pay $3 million for Princess Leia’s bikini at the Star Wars auction

— Bruce Lee statue heist

— baseball card heist 

— I do not think I would enjoy being swept out to sea and waiting 37 hours to be rescued 

— Pennsylvania man collects a Wawa ticket with every order number from 000 to 999, which is inspirational to me

— kid’s dad drops a Kyle Schwarber home run ball, kid cries, Phillies usher gets a ball for the kid, kid hugs the usher, Brian cries

— “Fun night with friends, watching a movie!!”

— a dude from Montauk is going to jail for catching too many fish

— Andy Samberg and I agree, Kenan Thompson rules 

— Peanut Butter the dog smashed a video game dinger and I love him very much

Okay, that’s enough for this week. Please subscribe and share and tell Jake Gyllenhaal to eat an entire pizza if he wants to keep playing stressed-out lawyers