IFC Rant - July 2002

This Secretary Won't be Getting Your Coffee
Written by Erin Torneo | Photography by Joshua Kessler

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s entrance in her first starring role is unforgettable. As Lee Holloway in Secretary, she saunters into the frame wearing demure business attire along with a contraption that prevents her from using her arms: it’s a long black bar that runs across her slim shoulders while suspending each wrist in chains. To lick the envelope she carries in her mouth, Lee has to get on her knees and place it on the ground, maneuvering toward it like a cat. At one point, her boss, E. Edward Grey, Esq. (played with slithering menace by James Spader), says to her, "You’re closed so tight. Do you ever loosen up?" And from one side of her mouth a smile curls just enough to let him know he doesn’t know what he’s in for when she answers, "Sometimes".

I’m not quite sure, then, exactly what to expect of Gyllenhaal, as I sit in Manhattan’s East Village, watching the door of the French-Thai café where we are meeting, but I’ve got some time to think about it. She’s late. Some minutes later, in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, Gyllenhaal rushes in with apologies and an air of excitement, explaining that her brother Jake (himself a rising actor praised for his performances in last year’s Donnie Darko and in August’s The Good Girl) is flying in from London where he’s been doing a play. She then unleashes the full curve of the smile, which will, in a few hours, charm every person at the IFCRant photo shoot.

While her name might be unfamiliar, Gyllenhaal has been working steadily in TV, film, and theater for the past 10 years. She’s made small turns in John Walter’s Cecil B. Demented (in a part reminiscent of vintage Winona Ryder roles), Donnie Darko, and mainstream fare like 40 Days and 40 Nights, with heartthrob Josh Hartnett. But expect to see a lot more of the 24 year old actress, who’s already working with some of the most respected names in the indie film world. Later this year, Gyllenhaal will travel to Mexico to star in Casa de los Babys, director John Sayles’ story of American women who travel to the third world to adopt children. She will also appear in two of writer Charlie Kaufman’s eagerly anticipated next projects. In Adaptation (due out later this year), Kaufman , the inventive scribe behind Being John Malkovich and Human Nature, reunites with director Spike Jones for another signature mindwalk through self-reflexive cinema. Gyllenhaal plays the girlfriend of Charlie Kaufman’s twin brother (the brothers Kaufman are played by none other than Nicholas Cage) in a film about Charlie Kaufman trying to adapt to screen Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. (You might want to read that again.) Additionally, she will have a small role in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a Kaufman script (about The Gong Show host Chuck Barris) that George Clooney will direct. "I have this joke with my agent that I won’t work for more than scale, because all of my projects are so tiny and have no budget," she laughs. "But I just wanted to support these films and be a part of them in any way because they are so provocative and interesting. That isn’t to say that if something interesting came along that had a big budget I wouldn’t do it," she continues "But a lot of stuff that I read isn’t particularly challenging."

Steven Shainberg’s Secretary certainly presented the actress with plenty of challenges. Loosely based on a short story of the same name by Mary Gaitskill, the film is a subversive fairy tale about an ugly-duckling-turned-swan who encounters her Prince Charming in a showdown of disturbed psyches. A sadomasochistic relationship flourishes (and later blossoms into love) between Gyllenhaal’s character, a mousy secretary with a secret history of cutting herself, and Spader’s severely meticulous lawyer. Acknowledging her own reservations about the S&M themes, Gyllenhaal says she "spent so much time before we ever even started shooting trying to find some peace about what the movie was saying politically. Then we started, I really just let all of it go, and felt my way through it, which in some ways is the political message."

I ask Gyllenhaal if she’s happened to see the well-received French film The Piano Teacher, which also explored the brutal side of desire between a masochistic piano teacher (Isabelle Huppert) and her student (Benoit Magimel), released in the U.S. earlier this year. Gyllenhaal recalls reading an interview with Huppert. "One of the things she was talking about that was relevant to Secretary was that the characters came out of a fucked up world where they weren’t allowed to feel what they feel. In Secretary, it’s this heightened ultra-suburbia, but I think that’s true in a lot of ways for everybody. In order to break though that numbness that they’ve learned, the only way they can feel is to hurt each other, at least initially," Gyllenhaal explains. "And I don’t really think that’s ideal, but it’s honest anyway."

In a stylized film like Secretary, however, it’s easy to fetishize the S&M scenes and dismiss (or embrace) the film as well-lit titillation. "Someone wrote an article in [Premiere] magazine, and the whole thing was about me being spanked," says Gyllenhaal. "And I resented it. That scene was something that had to happen because of the structure of the movie, but it was not even close to the most difficult, or the most complicated, or the most intimate thing that I had to do."

Still, it would be a tough scene for any veteran actor, let alone one who’s navigating her first big role - one opposite an actor who has canonized sexually deviant characters. "It was something overwhelming," admits Gyllenhaal. "After we finished, James took me aside and was like, ‘Are you OK? How do you feel? What do you feel? Talk to me,’ and I was like, ‘James, I just can’t talk to you right now,’ and I just burst out crying. It wasn’t that I felt manipulated, because I’m a thinking, aware person and I chose all of it. I just felt overwhelmed."

Equally overwhelming for Gyllenhaal was watching the film for the first time. "Right before, I got really sick with the flu, which I think is maybe not totally coincidental," she remembers. "It’s really hard for me to watch myself." Was it harder to have her parents watch it? "They are really supportive, and the fact that they make movies makes it much easier for them to handle," She says. (Gyllenhaal’s father is a director and her mother is a screenwriter, so the fact that she and her brother are both actor’s isn’t totally coincidental, either.) But Gyllenhaal, who was raised in Los Angeles but now lives in the West Village, is no typical Hollywood brat. The lanky actress is smart and opinionated - she graduated from Columbia University with a degree in literature and eastern religion - but quick to break up her seriousness with a throaty laugh.

At the photo shoot later, Gyllenhaal dons a hat and begins speaking French in between puffs on American Spirit cigarettes, It’s a winning performance that has us all laughing while it rains miserably outside Patio Dining, the bar where we’re shooting. And it’s easy to see that Gyllenhaal , whose look ranges from ordinary to adorable to sexy, is not going to follow any kind of easily labeled path in the long career she has in front of her - if she wants it. "For a long time, I went on auditions and people would tell me I wasn’t sexy or feminine enough," she says. "It wasn’t until a year ago that I really felt confident enough with myself as an individual, as a woman, to really open myself up to the possibility of how I fit into the world’s view of sexuality. Or how I fit into Hollywood’s view of sexuality." She’s fast to eschew those views, however, and prefers instead to take a cue from women like Gena Rowlands, one of her favorite actresses. "Sometimes she’s this hot bombshell, and sometimes she’s horrible to look at, rotten inside and broken," Gyllenhaal explains. "What’s really bold is to show a woman who’s actually both powerful and sexy, and also weak sometimes and confused and complicated."

Her own bold performance in Secretary is all of those things, though Gyllenhaal also wants to convince me that it’s a simple love story. "Lee comes from a place where no one see’s her. Then all of a sudden, she will make one typing error and it will enrage this man she’s working for to such a place that he can barley control himself and, ultimately, can’t control himself. To her that feels like someone’s seeing her for the first time. It’s dark, but it feels like love to her," she explains. "She is so innocent in the way that she has no sense that what she is doing is called ‘S&M’ or ‘dominant-submissive.’ She just feels, which I think allows her not to judge it. Even though everyone else in the world might say it’s sick, or perverse, or not love, or not intimacy, she has no reason to question it." She smiles and then adds, "It’s a really freeing way of looking at the world."

Owner: April | View staff
Host: The Fansite Network
Online: Read disclaimer
Shop: Amazon & eBay.com
Users Online [ Stats ]