It’s been nearly a decade since since audiences watched Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel team up for the cult classic rom-com remix (500) Days of Summer. Back then, it all seemed so clear: JGL’s character, Tom, was an affable boy-next-door and a hopeless romantic at heart. After an iconic meet-cute, he finds himself head-over-heels in love with Zooey’s Summer Finn, who was the apex of the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl."
They both love surrealist painting, they’re equally obsessed with the Smiths, and their faces are both wildly symmetrical. But after Summer is revealed to be totally agnostic when it comes to love, it’s Tom who’s left to pick up the pieces of his broken heart. Some people might even call Summer one of cinema’s all time greatest villains — but not so fast.
After a fan tweeted that he still hasn’t “forgiven Zooey Deschanel for what she did to Joseph Gordon-Levitt in (500) Days of Summer," JGL himself decided to chime in with some revisionist history. “Watch it again,” he wrote, adding: “It’s mostly Tom’s fault. He’s projecting. He’s not listening. He’s selfish. Luckily he grows by the end.”
This isn’t the first time JGL has denounced his old character. In 2012, he explained that maybe Tom didn’t deserve to find true love. “The (500) Days of Summer attitude of ‘He wants you so bad’ seems attractive to some women and men, especially younger ones,” he said at the time. “But I would encourage anyone who has a crush on my character to watch it again and examine how selfish he is.”
And in fact, when you examine Tom's character more closely, he starts to resemble guys who get angry when someone they like rejects them. And as sex educator Lena Solow put it to Teen Vogue last year, that's not a good quality in a prospective love interest. The antiquated notion of the "friend-zone" needs to die, not least of all because it's "a concept made up to make people (usually men) think that their niceness entitles them to a relationship (usually from women) and that friendship is some sort of punishment," she wrote. "Listen, any relationship based on a sense of entitlement isn't going to go well."
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