Biografia

Bobby Cannavale, who plays his father on Nurse Jackie (2009), is Jake's real-life father (with ex-wife/actress Jenny Lumet).

Jake's great-grandmother was Lena Horne and his grandfather was Sidney Lumet.

Two days before his first acting audition, for a role in Nurse Jackie (2009), he dyed his hair green. The gimmick worked and he got the part.

After his father Bobby Cannavale, his maternal grandfather Sidney Lumet and two of his maternal great-grandparents Baruch Lumet and Lena Horne, he is the fourth generation of his family to perform in a Broadway play.

With his blood ties to Bobby Cannavale, Lena Horne and the Sidney Lumet family, Jake is that rare fourth-generation member of an American show-business clan. And his polyglot ethnicity includes Cuban, northern European, Italian, Ashkenazi Jewish, Senegalese and Native American roots. Also from his great-grandmother Lena Horne's side, he is very likely a descendant of South Carolina political scion John C. Calhoun.