Trying to leave the past behind him. With Taylor Swift‘s “All Too Well” short film finally making its debut, there is one person not too thrilled about the project — Jake Gyllenhaal.
“Jake is mortified that Taylor has targeted him in ‘All Too Well,'” a source exclusively tells Life & Style, noting, “He’s such a private person and goes out of his way to avoid drama, so having their three-month fling dragged up in the song and hearing people gossip about it is a hard pill for him to swallow.”
Gyllenhaal, 40, and Swift, 31, briefly dated in 2010 before calling it quits that December. The romance was the inspiration between the singer’s 2012 album Red, which included songs like “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” At the time, the Miss Americana star revealed that she had discussed the project with the Nightcrawler star after it initially made headlines.
“He was like, ‘I just listened to the album, and that was a really bittersweet experience for me. It was like going through a photo album.’ That was nice,” Swift detailed during an interview with New York magazine in 2013. “Nicer than, like, the ranting, crazy e-mails I got from this one dude. It’s a lot more mature way of looking at a love that was wonderful until it was terrible, and both people got hurt from it — but one of those people happened to be a songwriter. So what are you going to do? Did you not Wikipedia me before you called me up [for a date]?”
In 2019, Swift announced plans to rerecord all of her albums after previous attempts to regain full ownership of her masters from her former record label, Big Machine.
The Pennsylvania native dropped the 30-track Red album on Friday, November 12, which included a 10-minute version of “All Too Well.” The track also inspired a short film, directed by Swift, which stars Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien. Fans were quick to point out the similarities between the characters in the video and Swift’s romance with Gyllenhaal.
According to the insider, the California native is not looking to be “questioned about someone he briefly dated 11 years ago.”
“He thought she was over it, but it seems like anyone who has dated Taylor can’t escape from their past,” the source adds.
Following the “All Too Well” short film release, the songwriter opened up about how the project is a “coming-of-age film about a very specific time in someone’s life when you are between 19 and 20.”
“You have one foot in childhood and one in adulthood and you don’t quite know where to stand and how fragile that makes you in that moment,” Swift explained to E!’s Daily Pop on Friday. “We go through life, we get our hearts broken, what does that give us, what does that take away. This is a film that asks those questions.”
The Teen Wolf alum, 30, who played Gyllenhaal in the movie, admitted that he knew right away that he wanted to work with Swift.
“I didn’t know [Taylor] knew who I was at all,” he shared at the time. “I’ve been a fan of hers for a long time, I love her, even more now. She’s like the best person ever, she is so brilliant. So yeah, it was like an automatic yes. I think we were sort of just hanging out on the phone and she asked me a while into it, like, you know, how long I wanted to think or whatever and it’s OK if I wanted to say no, and I was like, oh it’s not even a question.”