Update, 7/23: Underestimating Good Morning America's destructive potential, Jake Gyllenhaal told Howard Stern on Wednesday that he did not believe he had been shaded when the show introduced him to ex-girlfriend Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood."
"First of all, I did not hear that," he said, reminding himself that the strike would have failed if he pretended not to notice because self-awareness is the crux of shade. "When I'm doing an interview when you're up at 5 a.m. and you can't really make sense of words, you're not thinking about the background music that's playing behind you."
However, he did admit he is familiar with Tay Tay's oeuvre, inspiring vindictive teens interning at network television shows everywhere to queue up "All Too Well" during his next appearance.
Update, 7/21: Someone at Good Morning America is apparently not over Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal's breakup yet, so he used his access to the studio's sound system to express deep displeasure with an event that occurred in 2011.
As the morning chat show returned from commercial break Monday, Robin Roberts introduced the Southpaw actor while "Bad Blood" played. (For the record, Gyllenhaal is either such a skilled actor he kept all his facial features in check as he battled a torrent of guilt, or he didn't even notice. Let's go with the former.) This could, and has been, construed as a deliberate act of shade made all the more masterful by its timeliness (number two on Billboard's Hot 100, yo) and subtlety ("All Too Well," which is allegedly *about* him, would have been way too on-the-nose).
So is this actually the apotheosis of shade? Or does the shadee's obliviousness to the shader's efforts disqualify it because making someone feel bad without actually saying anything outright mean is the whole point?
Results: inconclusive. But if it were me, I'd be proud of my work and offer Marie Claire an exclusive interview, knowing that their editors would treat my story with the utmost sensitivity, respect, and only the finest GIFs.
