Jake Gyllenhaal shot some scenes in Michael Bay’s Ambulance himself

yahya abdul-mateen II and Jake Gyllenhaal in Ambulance, directed by Michael Bay
Share this Article:

Jake Gyllenhaal stars in Michael Bay’s upcoming action film Ambulance – but he also picked up the camera and shot some of the scenes himself.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II was surprised on the set of Ambulance by his co-star Jake Gyllenhaal shooting some scenes himself. The thriller is directed by 6 Underground's Michael Bay, but according to Abdul-Mateen, there were moments where Gyllenhaal would take the camera out of Bay’s hands and start directing instead.

In an interview with Esquire, Abdul-Mateen recalls the whole story. “There were times when he would take the camera from Mike [Bay] and then you look around and Jake is shooting the scene,” he says. “I had never seen anything like that before. I’m curious about those things, but I would never ask the director if I could shoot a scene.” The Candyman actor described Gyllenhaal as making the set of Ambulance his “playground”.

Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal said he always wondered what it would be like to shoot a Michael Bay film. In the same interview, he said that the director could be “brash and awkward” while on set. The actor has branched out into producing previously, through his Nine Stories Productions label, but has never directed. Based on this story, I wouldn’t be surprised if he took it up in the near future.

Ambulance is based on a 2005 Danish film of the same name, directed by Lauritz Munch-Petersen and Lars Andreas Pedersen. Bay’s version focuses on an army veteran (played by Abdul-Mateen) who turns to Gyllenhaal for help when he needs a large sum of money for his wife’s surgery. They plan to pull off a bank robbery.

Gyllenhaal’s character has a checkered past, and things go south when he accidentally lets in a cop while the robbery is taking place. The two end up stealing an ambulance as a getaway vehicle, but it turns out there are people inside, turning a heist gone wrong into a hostage situation. The film was shot in and around Los Angeles.

Ambulance will be released in UK cinemas on 25th March.

Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:

Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.

Buy our Film Stories and Film Stories Junior print magazines here.

Become a Patron here.

Share this Article:

More like this