Jake Gyllenhaal explains dramatic weight loss for ‘Nightcrawler’: ‘I was always a bit hungry’

Jake Gyllenhaal explains dramatic weight loss for ‘Nightcrawler’: ‘I was always a bit hungry, Gyllenhaal plays a video news journalist in ‘Nightcrawler,’ which he’s also co-producing.

Jake Gyllenhaal is a prisoner to his art.

The 32-year-old actor dramatically changed his appearance by dropping a significant amount of weight for his role in “Nightcrawler,” reports Us Weekly.

“I knew that [Lou] was literally and figuratively hungry,” he said of his character, a freelance crime reporter who discovers a dark underground world in Los Angeles.

“It takes place in a land where I think there is a desert in a lot of ways, great opulence, and at the same time, great vastness and emptiness,” he said of the film’s scenery.

Noticeably gaunt, Jake Gyllenhaal arrives at the 17th annual Hollywood Film Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on Monday in Beverly Hills, Calif.

The “Prisoner” actor showed up to the 17th Annual Hollywood Film Awards on Monday with his shocking new look. He appeared bony with protruding cheekbones.

In order to truly relate to his part, Gyllenhaal said, he stayed in a “mode where I was always a bit hungry.”Other Hollywood heavy weights who have shed several pounds for roles include Christian Bale in 2004’s

“The Machinist,” for which he lost 65 pounds in order to portray an insomniac industrial worker, and “Magic Mike’s” Matthew McConaughey, who grinded down his physique by 50 pounds for “Dallas Buyers Club” to play a HIV-positive man.

“I play a lot of intense characters, and going the other way can help,” Gyllenhaal said in the November issue of GQ Australia about rocking out to pop music in order to transition between roles.

Gyllenhaal with his standard, heavier appearance in June at the Tony Awards in New York City.

“Sometimes if you listen to something that’s the complete opposite of the feeling you’re having, you can dive even deeper,” he added.

Gyllenhaal’s recent shift for the Tony Gilroy-directed thriller is momentary, as the actor admits to his love affair with various cuisines.

“I’m obsessed with food,” he told the Aussie mag. “I love eating in general, but if I’m somewhere on location, I tend to find one restaurant and weirdly will eat one or two things that I love. Then I’ll know I’m going there at the end of the day to eat that thing.”

But food aside, Gyllenhaal’s new gaunt appearance is surely his way of staying focused on the character he’s tasked to portray in the film he’s also co-producing.

“I think [I’ve lost] probably a little over 20 pounds, something like that,” he told People. “Who’s to say what the process is? I have a strange one … but I love what I do.”