Entertainment Weekly - November 14th 2003

Written by Chris Nashawaty | Photography by James White

Maggie Gyllenhaal felt like the resident bad girl on the set of Mona Lisa. Call it Method acting for her role as Giselle, the rebellious, sexually liberated one. Or call it the MO of an indie actress raging against the big-studio machine. Either way, Gyllenhaal laughs thinking about how she spent her downtime during her first big commercial movie: blasting Black Sabbath in her trailer. "When I was making [Mona Lisa], I was resisting the scale of it--you know, the big Hollywood movie--in a really embarrassingly self-concious way."

Gyllenhaal speaks in a soft, Kewpie-doll voice. She's whip-smart and fiercely opinionated. She also likes to talk in byzantinely elaborate sentences that turn back on themselves and may or many not finish where she intended them to. Her mother is a screenwriter who won an Oscar nomination for Running on Empty, her father's a director and her brother, Jake, is both an actor and the boyfriend of costar Kirsten Dunst.

Still, she's not a household name outside of the art-film hothouses of New York and Los Angeles. There, the young actress is recognized from last year's indie hit, Secretary--a film which she won a Golden Globe nod--for playing a self-destructive girl who calms her inner demons by becoming a submissive, S&M gal Friday. Since then, her whole world changed. "After the Golden Globe, it got hyped to a place where it kind of scared me. I don't think I was prepared to deal with that. It was scary. It made me anxious."

In the whirlwind year of Secretary, Gyllenhaal has been seen in smaller roles in Spike Jonze's Adaptation, George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, John Sayles' Casa de los Babys, and now Mona Lisa Smile. Yet she worries that casting directors will look at her and see her black-and-blue Secretary character instead of a versatile actress. "Recently, I wanted to be in The Merchant of Venice," she says. "And the director was like, 'She's not Portia.' When anyone who knows I could totally play Portia. They were thinking that the character I played in Secretary couldn't play Portia. I'm perfect for Portia!"

Now that Gyllenhaal has started receiving offers for bigger roles in bigger films, her agent must be just thrilled that she's decied to turn them away to work for practically nothing doing theater. Since September, Gyllenhaal has been starring in an L.A. production of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, which she plays a British woman searching for her missing mother in Taliban-era Afghanistan. "I've never worked on anything like this play," she says. "I'm a different actress now than I was before I started it. It's taking everything I have--my brain, my body, my heart, everything. I've been completely humble by it."

Gyllenhaal says that working with Roberts opened her eyes to the good and bad that comes with stardom. "One thing I've watched Julia do that I've been impressed with is when people come up and say 'Oh, my God, you're Julia Roberts! Can you sign this? Can I take a picture with you?' [she's] real clear about her boundaries. I think that level of fame may come with a hardship. But yeah, I would like to have some power, and use it well, and make good movies... something provocative".

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