Jake Gyllenhaal was rushed to hospital after he injured his hand.

The 32-year-old actor severely cut himself while on the set of his new film Nightcrawler - in which he plays a struggling crime reporter in Los Angeles - on Wednesday and was forced to seek medical assistance.

"Jake was indeed filming Nightcrawler when during the shooting of an intense scene his character purposefully banged his hand into the mirror. Unfortunately the mirror broke and Jake's hand was badly cut up. He got numerous stitches at the ER and was released. He already returned to set for work," Gyllenhaal's rep stated.

Jake has been working hard to perfect his role and previously revealed he lost weight because his character was both "literally and figuratively hungry." He said"It takes place in a land where I think there is a desert in a lot of ways, great opulence, and at the same time, great vastness and emptiness. I knew that [Lou] was literally and figuratively hungry." In order to feel more like the character, the actor aimed to look almost skeletal and got into a "mode where I was always a bit hungry."