The Impossibility of Figuring Out the Height of Actors
As big, tongue-in-cheek-but-not-really fans of "24," our favorite moment of unintentional comedy from that show came when someone unveiled Jack Bauer's height: They claimed he was "6-foot-4." Yeah. Right. Figuring out the exact height of movie stars -- and hiding the height of the tiniest ones -- is a Hollywood tradition, from Humphrey Bogart (5' 8") to Tom Cruise (4' 5", we think). But over at Good Magazine, writer David Rees goes down the rabbit hole, trying to figure out just how tall Jake Gyllenhaal is.
It's really something to read: Rees, in his own personal obsession (and also his obsession with how much time he's wasting on his obsession), discovers CelebHeights.com, which exists solely to chronicle the heights of famous people. He lands on Jake Gyllenhaal's CelebHeights page, and oh boy.
The CelebHeights.com discussion of Jake Gyllenhaal goes quiet for weeks at a time. Then someone posts an account of a recent sighting, or a photo of Gyllenhaal standing beside a celebrity of quantifiable tallness (like Xzibit), and then someone else counters that Gyllenhaal's height is hard to calculate because "his body is like a peruvian guy (large oblong head, short neck)," adding "I should see him shaven" (?!?), and the whole thing flares up again. Any new piece of data, in the hands of the right maniac, can help a fact of the matter remain perpetually contested. This debate has been going strong for almost two years; is it any wonder that issues of slightly graver import—climate change, the theory of evolution, President Obama's citizenship—are usually 5,000 percent overdebated?
Yeah, these people are pretty crazy, who cares about that stuff ... hey, look at that picture up there. OK, so Amy Adams is listed as five-foot-four, and Luke Matheny is described as "shockingly tall," and that Oscar statue might be about 40 feet tall ... darnit, all right, we're in. How damned tall is Jake Gyllenhaal?
How Tall Is Jake Gyllenhaal? [Good]
