Jake Gyllenhaal, who is seen in playing Searcher Clade in Strange World, said that he faced a ‘fated connection’ to the Don Hall-directed animated film as it treats a family as a ‘microcosm’ for the rest of the world.
He elucidated, “When they pitched me the story of Strange World, I was so moved. It lines up with so many things that I believe, like the psychological dynamics in a family, the generational issues that we all have, how difficult we find loving to be sometimes — and I also think the idea that family is a microcosm for how we treat the world and what is taught within that unit is eventually what we bring to the world outside of us. It was really a very special, fated connection with the story.”
The actor added, “I think we grow up and we try for many years to define ourselves to be our own selves, separate from our family, no matter how much we love them, or they love us. There are desires that our parents have for us; there are things that they push us into that they don’t even realize they are. There’s a whole unconscious world going on underneath all of the conscious world that we live in, and it was why I loved this story so much. Because Strange World is really a world — though it has all these amazing layers underneath it—about having to go to a place that is maybe scary or different to be able to learn to listen to the people we love the most in our lives.”
Director Don Hall stated how the actor have prepared and gelled with the character which he did it from the scratch. “I think [Jake] approaches everything through a deep understanding of the story. He comes at it from an emotional place first. He understood very early on where Searcher was coming from emotionally. But he was good at situational stuff, too. We could describe a scene—‘You’re running from a giant, tentacled monster’—and he was able to take that leap of imagination and do versions that were fun and funny. He brought a lot of humor to Searcher and the animators fed off of it.” he averred.
Strange World is now streaming on the OTT platform Disney+ Hotstar.
