You can stop giving Jake Gyllenhaal a wide berth as the actor has insisted he does actually shower after controversially saying bathing was ‘less necessary’.
The Brokeback Mountain actor became embroiled in the bizarre bathing debate earlier this summer, after Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher said they only wash their children when they can ‘see the dirt’.
Jake then followed up and said in an interview that he finds ‘bathing to be less necessary’ these days and, well, he basically couldn’t live it down.
During a Q&A at the screening of his new Netflix movie The Guilty in Los Angeles on Saturday, Jake was asked about his hygiene routine and he finally set the record straight.
Speaking on stage in front of an audience, the Donnie Darko actor joked: ‘By the way I [filmed] an independent film, of course I don’t shower. What are you writing about? Of course we don’t have the money for showers.
‘I think, by the way, anyone who’s used a trailer, has the shower ever really worked? They don’t work in trailers, the sinks barely do.’
He then explained: ‘I don’t know what it was, it was an answer to a question where I was being sarcastic and ironic and it’s followed me around.’
‘Unfortunately I showered before I came here so I’m sorry about that,’ he quipped.
It was during an interview with Vanity Fair in August that Jake made his divisive statement.
The 40-year-old actor also declared that one of the positive side-effects of not washing is how ‘really helpful’ it can be for ‘skin maintenance’.
‘More and more I find bathing to be less necessary, at times,’ he shared.
‘I do believe, because Elvis Costello is wonderful, that good manners and bad breath get you nowhere. So I do that.’
It all began when Bad Moms actress Mila told Dax Shepherd on his podcast that he should ‘not be getting rid of the natural oil on your skin with a bar of soap every day’.
She shares two children with husband Ashton – daughter Wyatt, six, and son Dimitri, four.
Explaining the reason behind this unorthodox choice of hers, the 37-year-old mother said: ‘I didn’t have hot water growing up as a child, so I didn’t shower much anyway. But when I had children, I also didn’t wash them every day. I wasn’t that parent that bathed my newborns – ever.’
Ashton weighed in: ‘I do have a tendency to throw some water on my face after a workout to get all the salts out,’ to which his wife added: ‘I do wash my face twice a day.’
Kristen Bell then defended the couple, stating that she was ‘a big fan of waiting for the stink’ before she cleaned her children.
However, Dwayne Johnson entered the chat to clarify that he is ‘the opposite of a “not washing themselves” celeb’, while Aquaman star Jason Momoa said he was also the showering kind.
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