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Jake Gyllenhaal on sex scene with Jennifer Aniston: 'The pillow technique was used'

By Megan Armstrong | Last updated 10/6/21

Jake Gyllenhaal dispelled any illusions about his film The Good Girl while visiting The Howard Stern Show, detailing that the connection between his character Holden and Justine (Jennifer Aniston) was more clinical than chemistry.

"Weirdly, love scenes are awkward because there are maybe 30, 50 people watching it," Gyllenhaal said. "Maybe if you have a closed set, it's less. That doesn't turn me on, so most of the time, it's oddly mechanical. And also, it's a dance. You're choreographing for a camera, right? I mean, you can get in it, but it's one of the spaces like a fight scene. You gotta choreograph those things."

The 40-year-old actor continued: "I do remember a pillow. The pillow technique was used. That was just preemptive and used generally always when actually in a horizontal place in that movie. Everything else was whatever it was. I remember those two characters did a lot of making out on, like, boxes in a back room."

The Good Girl came out in August 2002. Directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike White, the romantic dramedy centered Retail Rodeo clerk Justine, who is married to Phil (John C. Reilly), as she engages in an affair with the stock boy Holden, who is obsessed with Holden Caulfield and The Catcher in the Rye.

Gyllenhaal was 22 at the time, and Aniston was eight years into her 10-year run on Friends.

"I will say, I had a crush on her for years," Gyllenhaal said of Aniston in 2016, "and working with her was not easy. I was—um, yeah. That’s all I’m going to say. It was lovely. It wasn’t hard, that’s what I would say."

In present day, the one-time Oscar nominee currently stars in Netflix's thriller The Guilty. Watch the trailer below.