Don’t Worry Darling press drama is being compared to iconic Jake Gyllenhaal moment

The premiere of Don’t Worry Darling at the Venice Film Festival this week will go down in internet history. 

From red carpet awkwardness to alleged phlegm throwing (you can read all about that here), Olivia Wilde’s latest directorial endeavour has went mega-viral for all the wrong reasons.

But nothing tops this awkward interview with two of the film’s stars, Harry Styles and Chris Pine, in which the latter seemingly wills the world to swallow him whole as Styles declared his ‘favourite thing about the movie is that it feels like a movie’.

Now, pop culture connoisseurs are comparing the clip to a similarly awkward one of Jake Gyllenhaal back in 2019 when he was promoting Velvet Buzzsaw. Watch the clip below:

Gyllenhaal was taking part in a recorded interview with the flick’s director, Dan Gilroy, and co-stars Rene Russo, Billy Magnussen, Natalia Dyer, and Zawe Ashton.

At one point during the group interview, Gilroy was describing Russo as an actor, saying: “[Russo’s] soulful, spiritual, she has a touch of melancholy.”

The kicker? Gilroy didn't pronounce ‘melancholy’ in the normal meh-luhng-ko-lee way, but rather ‘mell-AHN-coly’.

Gyllenhaal immediately picked up on Gilroy’s peculiar pronunciation, turning to the director and saying: “It’s meh-luhng-ko-lee. That is not the first time today [that I’ve had to tell him].”

The clip quickly went viral, prompting Gilroy to address the moment in an interview a month later with Insider. 

He explained it was all an inside joke, and he was actually trying to copy the way Will Ferrell’s character pronounces melancholy in the 2010 film Megamind.

Gilroy shared: “I have to give credit to Will Ferrell and Megamind, which is a movie I really love.

“Will Ferrell came up with this great thing in the film where he mispronounces words, including 'melancholy’.”

Gilroy said that he’d been talking about the film to Gyllenhaal moments before they sat down for the interview, sharing: "I was joking around with Jake and started saying 'melancholy' and Jake was dying [laughing].

"So the camera starts rolling, and I throw out 'melancholy' as a joke to Jake and he — in all seriousness — corrects me."

As for Styles and Pine’s viral clip, Twitter users couldn’t get enough of it when it started doing the social media rounds this week, with one person writing: “Poor Chris Pine looks like he'd rather be anywhere else on the planet.” 

Another added: “Everything about this clip is so painful,” while a third quipped: “I think he’s trying to do Morse code with his blinks telling people he needs help. Poor guy.”

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