He’s perfect for ‘Persia’

He’s new to this action hero business. But Jake Gyllenhaal, who has the title role in “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” has figured out how to make swordfights – or in his case, scimitar fights – work.

“You’ve got to get across the danger, flirt with potentially getting hurt, actually hurt,” he says. “Viewers will accept nothing less.”

He knows his reputation – sensitive guys, indie films, “Brokeback Mountain.”

“It’s an absurdly different sort of movie for me to do,” he says of “Persia.” “Not at all what other people would expect from me or I would expect of myself. That’s the challenge of it, not taking the easy way.”

Besides, he says, “I’m tired of taking myself so seriously. Seriously.”

Gyllenhaal, 29, is certainly serious about working out. He beefed up big time for “Jarhead,” and took “ripped” to new extremes for “Prince of Persia,” Jerry Bruckheimer’s big-budget adaptation of the popular video game.

He put in the prep because he didn’t want to screw up a game he knew long before Bruckheimer invited him to spend months in Morocco.

“I actually played the first, side-scrolling version of the game that some people will remember, when I was a kid,” he says.

“And then I took a brief 20-year hiatus. After I read the script, I picked up the game again to see what it was like. It was research for the movie. Just research. I ended up playing all the way through the shoot, pretty much.”

Gyllenhaal says his enthusiasm for all this action shtick is a direct reaction to his upbringing.

The son of director Stephen Gyllenhaal and screenwriter Naomi Foner, younger sibling to actress Maggie, he says that “with the sort of stuck-up movie tastes that my dad and mom had, that maybe my sister shared, I was all about popcorn movies: ‘Indiana Jones,’ ‘The Goonies,’ ‘E.T.’ Those are the movies I loved, no matter what my parents said.

“If you were to tell the 8-year-old me back then that today I’d be playing the Prince of Persia, jumping off buildings, sword fighting and getting the girl, my head would have exploded.”

The birthday bunch

Actor Clint Walker (“Cheyenne”) is 83. Actor Keir Dullea is 74. Actor Michael J. Pollard is 71. Actor Colm Meaney is 57. Actor Ted McGinley is 52. Actor Ralph Carter (“Good Times”) is 49. Country singer Wynonna Judd is 46. Singer Cee-Lo is 36.