Jake Gyllenhaal’s Throwback Instagram Post Has Been Turned Into A Taylor Swift Shrine

Can you imagine what life is like for Jake Gyllenhaal? Waking up every day, looking in the mirror, and saying, ‘Hey, I’m the guy from Prisoners‘? Deciding whether to star in a Marvel flick, or help John Mulaney out with his new kid’s show? Booting up the family desktop to check up on the Donnie Darko community?

I struggle. His existence is so alien to my own, so totally ensconced in talent and prestige, that it barely feels like we exist in the same physical realm.

Yet there is one thing Gyllenhaal and I share: we are yelled at online. Me, because my writing is bad. He, because he once dated Taylor Swift, and her fans will never, ever let him forget it.

Taking to Instagram yesterday, the actor shared a photo of himself as a young school kid. The black-and-white pic shows young Jake sporting a pair of heavy, circular specs.

The photo wasn’t just a fun throwback for the guy, but a call for followers to support New Eyes for the Needy, a US-based charity which provides glasses to folks at home and abroad.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFsmCrtHPe7/

Swift fans did not see the post as a charitable promotion, though. They saw Gyllenhaal’s bespectacled face as a visual cue from Swift’s song All Too Well, and an invitation to quote the shit out of it.

For the uninitiated, Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal briefly dated ten years ago. Their relationship and split was encoded in her Red album standout, which includes this lyric:

Photo album on the counter
Your cheeks were turning red
You used to be a little kid with glasses in a twin-sized bed

Of course, Swift’s fans jumped at the chance to spam old mate with All Too Well references. Observe:

via @jakegyllenhaal / Instagram
via @jakegyllenhaal / Instagram
via @jakegyllenhaal / Instagram

There are pages and pages of this. Dozens, potentially hundreds of comments, all in the same vein. He’s the kid from All Too Well!

Granted, I am not immune to jumping and pointing at references I understand – I was extremely one of those Donnie Darko fans, and I still think of The Killing Moon as that intro song – but I am just one dude. This is something else.

I think I get it now: to imagine being Jake Gyllenhaal is to imagine perpetually being Taylor Swift’s ex.

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