Being punched in the face by a mixed martial arts world champion will ruin your work day. But, that’s exactly what happened to Oscar-nominated Jake Gyllenhaal when he and UFC superstar Conor McGregor brought the reimagined Road House to life.
Now streaming on Amazon Prime, Gyllenhaal heads the cult classic reboot as Dalton, a rough and tough ex-UFC combatant hired as a bouncer at a Florida-based bar. Meanwhile, McGregor’s Knox has been hired on to send the pesky Dalton back where he came from.
The movie builds toward a hand-to-hand duel between Dalton and McGregor. And while speaking with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show ahead of Road House’s premiere, Gyllenhaal revealed that McGregor – here making his cinematic debut – unintentionally caught him with a punch when they were working on a late-night fight scene.
“By mistake, he clocked me in the face. We would do a take where we were fighting and fake fighting, and then we’d go watch the monitor to see it back, to see what worked. And he was always great with me. He would show me, tell me to do things, ‘Turn your head, move a little bit more this way to try and make it look more real.’ And it was late because we shot a lot of these fight scenes at night. So, it was like 3 a.m. and he was talking to me really close. And he was like, ‘Yeah, that left hook looks good. But then when you do it, like,’ boom! He hit me by mistake.”
“And I was like, ‘Oh!’ And he was like, ‘Oh!'”
Gyllenhaal trained in martial arts for two months to prepare for the task of Dalton. But, pretending to fight someone who has captured two divisional titles in the world’s premiere mixed martial arts promotion is intimidating, even if it is acting:
“When I got word that he was going to be doing it, I was super psyched because they chased him for a long time to play the part. But, then I got totally terrified and I thought, ‘Oh, God, I actually have to fake fight this guy, and I got to look like I can.'”
Before stepping on set McGregor established himself as a combat icon after an iconic run inside the UFC’s Octagon, which saw him winning both the 155 and 145-pound titles. In 2016, “Notorious” became the first fighter to hold two UFC belts simultaneously. With a professional record of 22-6 with 19 wins by KO/TKO, the brash Irishman seamlessly fit the role of a terrifying bruiser in Road House.
You can check out WGTC’s review of Road House here.
