Jake Gyllenhaal warned Josh Gad not to do “The Book of Mormon”

Don't threaten Josh Gad with a good time.

When the Frozen and Beauty and the Beast actor was still waffling over whether or not to pursue a role in a new musical from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone called The Book of Mormon, he turned to a new friend for advice.

"While bouncing back and forth to do episodes of The Daily Show, I was also filming a movie called Love & Other Drugs, directed by Ed Zwick and starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway," Gad writes in his new memoir In Gad We Trust, released Jan. 14.

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Gad continues, "One day as Jake and I were driving home from set in Pittsburgh, I asked him if I could play a demo of a new musical that I had recently done a workshop for in New York, hoping to get his advice as to whether or not I should pursue it further. He said, 'Yeah, pop it on,' and I played the opening number." Gyllenhaal had no idea what he'd just agreed to hear.

"Jake laughed his ass off" when Gad played him the first song. Then, "I skipped to another track on the album and his face slowly went from joyful enthusiasm to abject fear and terror. He stopped the car and said, 'Dude, you cannot do whatever this is. This will be way too controversial. Who the hell wrote this anyway?' I paused the music and looked over at him. 'The South Park guys.'"

Reps for Gyllenhaal did not respond to Entertainment Weekly's request for comment.

Around the time Love & Other Drugs entered production in late 2009, The Book of Mormon was only in the workshop stage. "Nobody was really sure what the endgame was," Gad writes, and then "there was also the small issue of the thing not being fully written."

Gad doesn't reveal which songs he played for Gyllenhaal, but it's likely that the song was the edgelord anthem "Hasa Diga Eebowai," which Gad describes being retooled at various workshops and contains lyrics like "f--- you, God" and "I will give you my AIDS!"

The actor did eventually agree to star in The Book of Mormon, which premiered on Broadway at the Eugene O'Neill Theater in 2011. Gad originated the role of Elder Cunningham alongside Andrew Rannells' Elder Price in a satiric look at two young missionaries' misguided attempts to spread the gospel in a small Ugandan village. The actors both remained in their roles for 15 months and were nominated for the Tony for Best Actor in a Musical.

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Recounting the first workshop test of "Hasa Diga Eebowai," Gad says the first "f--- you, God" induced a "collective gasp [that] now had more audible sounds to them. You could really only hear a mixture of consonants and syllables, not representing any actual words in the English dictionary, but rather universal sounds of stunned shock and displeasure. The stunned response from the audience was a timely reminder that sometimes, very controversial satire might be better left to rudimentary animated characters on Comedy Central."

Ultimately, The Book of Mormon became a massive hit, garnering Gad fans like Robin Williams and Mel Brooks, who wrote the afterword for In Gad We Trust. The Book's book even won Parker, Stone, and Robert Lopez a Tony. Gad describes "Hasa Diga Eebowai," by far the raciest cut from that book, as "that rare song that can somehow manage to properly offend every single demographic simultaneously while also daring the same offended parties not to laugh at the outrageousness of it all."

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