Jake Gyllenhaal recalls awkward first meeting with Brad Pitt in which he hit a door

Everyone gets a little starstruck — even Jake Gyllenhaal.

The actor revealed that the first time he met Brad Pitt, he was so nervous he actually hit a door.

"I was working with Jennifer Aniston, who was his wife at the time, and there were a lot of very racy scenes," Gyllenhaal revealed to W for its 2022 Best Performances Series, recalling the work he did with Aniston on the 2002 film The Good Girl. "I remember putting my hand out to shake his and accidentally hitting the door."

Of course, Pitt being Pitt was more than cool about the gaffe. "He said, so confidently and kindly, 'Well, you have another one. It's all right,'" Gyllenhaal told W. "He was very, very, very sweet to me, and it was actually a really lovely exchange."

Gyllenhaal also took a trip down memory lane during a recent appearance on Howard Stern's Sirius XM show, remembering how "it was torture... but it was also not torture" shooting some of the more intimate scenes with Pitt's then-wife.

"The pillow technique was used. That was just preemptive, and used — generally, always — when actually in a horizontal place in that movie," Gyllenhaal told Stern. "Everything else is whatever it was. I remember those two characters did a lot of making out on, like, boxes in the back room."

It's understandable that Gyllenhaal might have been a little anxious meeting Pitt, a bona fide A-lister. But Pitt's not the only star who's caused the actor to fan-boy. Gyllenhaal admitted he was also more than a little smitten with Mandy Patinkin, who originated the title role in the Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park With George, when he came to see Gyllenhaal perform in back in 2018.

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