Jake Gyllenhaal’s Reported Response to Taylor Swift’s Re-Release of ‘All Too Well’ Revealed

Jake Gyllenhaal got a lot of attention this month for the resurgence of Taylor Swift’s song “All Too Well,” which is reportedly about their breakup. According to a report by E! News, the song, the new music video and all the fan speculation is completely off of Gyllenhaal’s radar. Hopefully, that doesn’t infuriate fans even further.

“Jake has no interest in any of it,” a source close to Gyllenhaal said. “He doesn’t read gossip or pay any attention to that. He’s living his life and focused on himself. He’s ignoring all of the noise.” For those catching up, Gyllenhaal and Swift dated for around three months in 2010, and “All Too Well” was on Swift’s album Red in 2012. At the time, it was assumed that it was about Gyllenhaal based on a few context clues, and the new extended version of the song drops some even stronger hints.

Swift re-recorded Red in its entirety for a new release called Red (Taylor’s Version). The singer needed to re-record all of her old music to escape her old record contract, and she took the opportunity to beef up “All Too Well” into a 10-minute ballad, along with a 15-minute short film starring Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien.

The new verses and the short film are chock full of Easter eggs hinting that the subject of the song is Gyllenhaal, with fans dissecting the lyrics and relating them to real life. Like the characters in the song, Swift and Gyllenhaal had a huge age gap between them, and the song mentions an “actress” that some have speculated is Gyllenhaal’s sister, Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Swift has never confirmed or denied fans’ theory that this song – and the entire Red album – is about Gyllenhaal. She did say that she had heard from the subject of the songs in a 2013 interview with New York Magazine.

“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,” she recalled. “Nicer than, like, the ranting, crazy e-mails I got from this one dude.”

Swift is re-recording all of her own music from the six studio albums she made with Big Machine Records. When that contract expired, the label was sold to Scooter Braun’s company Ithaca Holdings, along with all the original master recordings of Swift’s music. Copies for sale are only made from these master recordings, so while Swift may have creative rights to this music, she can’t have commercial control of their release without the masters. Braun reportedly asked for $300 million in exchange for the masters, and required her to sign a non-disclosure agreement promising never to speak ill of him publicly again.

Instead, Swift is re-recording her first six albums, in the process revisiting songs that are a decade and a half old. So far, fans seem to feel that the process is bearing some interesting fruit.