Interview - February 2003

Maggie Gyllenhaal - Interview
Interview by Tony Kushner | Photography by Bruce Webber

When I finished the first draft of my play Homebody/Kabul I needed a young American actress with a good British accent in her back pocket to play one of the lead roles, so I asked various friends if they had any suggestions. Several people had been dazzled by an actress named Maggie Gyllenhaal in Patrick Marber's play Closer. I got the script to Maggie in L.A., and she flew to New York to participate in a reading of the play and meet with me. I was bowled over from our first conversation. She's fantastically smart, politically engaged, and immensely talented, the kind of actor playwrights live to write for. So I agreed to interview her for this publication. I am, unfortunately, afflicted by interviewitis. I feel like Typhoid Mary when I'm doing one. Technically speaking, I just cannot make tape recorders work.

TONY KUSHNER: I feel very odd interviewing you. The only other time I tried this was with Liza Minnelli, and the recorder didn't pick up anything. I have a problem working small machines. So, I loved your movie, Secretary, Maggie! It's so smart about the mechanics of power in sexual relationships. I remember when we first met you'd just finished filming and you were anxious about it.

MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL: Well, I didn't know what the movie was saying. Steve [Shainberg, Secretary's director] said that he had interviewed women who were older than me--I was 23 when made it--who, it was clear, knew more about power and sex and sexuality and S & M than I did. In retrospect, I was naive when I was making the movie, in terms of the emotions of it. Intellectually I wasn't naive--I knew what to look for and what to fight against. But the pieces of the performance that I'm really proud of are where I had no idea what was going to happen.

TK: Like what pieces?

MG: There's this moment after he [James Spader's character] masturbates on me, when I get up from having been bent over his desk, and I could not intellectualize what that would feel like. Sometimes I feel that only using my brain can get in my way. Like when I did Closer, there were a couple of lines I just couldn't get my head around, and then one night I opened myself up enough to live in the unconscious of someone else, instead of just their brain.

TK: Actors are so strange! It seems that you know more, when you're playing a character, than you are aware of knowing.

MG: When we first rehearsed Secretary, I sat with my script and a pencil and broke everything down. Steve and I would argue over the finest points. We had worked through it so specifically that in a calculated way I said, "Okay, I can trust you." I was not willing to give it up--he had to fight for it. But with James, we had a tacit agreement to say, "Let's go anywhere we want." I let myself decide that both of them, within the boundaries of the film set, could manipulate me. Which is kind of what happens in the movie, too. My character says, "I'm relinquishing some amount of power and I'm going to let you move me." But it's clear that I'm deciding it. I'm choosing it.

TK: When I saw Secretary the audience maybe came expecting to get some kinky pleasure out of it, and found themselves disturbed and moved. It's genuinely surprising.

MG: Yeah. I like what the ad campaign did, though at first I didn't. It was this woman's ass, and it said, "Assume the position." A lot of people came in expecting to see something they didn't see.

TK: We forget that the unexpected has great entertainment value--that's why psychoanalysis is so much fun. We've talked about therapy before--we've both been patients. Do you believe in the unconscious?

MG: Yes. When I started going to therapy there wasn't a specific, clear, rational thing that made me start, but as soon as I did, everything in my life changed, almost immediately. Even just calling the therapist started a wave going. Maybe three weeks into it I had a dream where I was like, "I need to change a lot of things."

TK: Did you find that going changed the way you were dreaming?

MG: Yeah. And the way I was looking at my dreams. I had an incredible experience when I was doing Casa de los Babys [an upcoming film directed by John Sayles]. On the last day of my working, it was a really intense scene, and I hadn't mapped it out. My call was at 8 A.M., and I had gone to sleep at 11, so I was rested, but I was tired. I got to the set, and I had maybe an hour while they got the lights . together, so I lay down and had an overwhelming dream--and I feel as if I needed to have it in order to play the scene. There's another part of me working that isn't the intellectual side--the unconscious--and that was not awake most of my life. Not actively. There were times when it would push through, but now I feel I'm really honoring it.

TK: What was the dream about?

MG: I was on a beach, and we were shooting the movie. There were a couple of palapas, which are little huts made of palm ferns, and I was sitting by the edge of the water, and John Sayles sat down next to me. As he sat, this woman a nd her daughter came running up to the shore, and the mother said, "She's scared of the water," to the little girl, and the girl said, "She should be. It's scary." And then this huge wave came, and I saw it getting bigger, and that it was going to wash over us. Two seconds later I got woken up: John came in and said he wanted to talk to me, and he put the stakes of what was happening to my character so high. Then I went and worked, and I've never done work I'm more proud of. I went as far as I could possibly go. At this point the tape recorder decided to stop taping. I can't account for it. We talked more about therapy, about Tibetan Buddhism. We were talking about Maggie's conviction that art can be transformative if made with the intention to transform when 1 realized that my recorder had betrayed us.

TK: I'm completely freaked out. A lot of that didn't record. Oh. God.

MG: It's okay! It's okay!

TK: It's not! It's terrible! Oh my God, it's Liza Minnelli all over again.

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