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The Library
Paper - September 2002
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough
Written by Porochista Khakpour | Photography by Richard Phibbs
 To the film industry,
Maggie Gyllenhaal has mostly been the sister of Jake, another glowing beauty with a Hollywood pedigree coming
out in a big way. That is, until the buzz surrounding her performance in the art-house sizzler Secretary turned
into a din. Gyllenhaal's breakthrough role has had cinemaniacs creaming since its first screening at Sundance.
The libertine flick's whip-cracking "Assume the position" ad campaign hasn't helped ease Hollywood's hard-on, either.
The 24-year-old giggles, and I feel perverted. She wears white in that Scandinavian, freshly showered way. Her
flawless, tawny skin is offset by enormous aquamarine eyes. Framed by a little girl's bob, her almost-cherubic
face betrays her lithe, 5'9" frame -- she's a lanky, knobby-boned girl who makes hunching sexy. She possesses
that air of health certain West Coast girls exude; you could imagine her in a milk ad, you'd want her handling
your organic produce -- you would buy this girl cherries.
It throws me off.
Secretary is about S&M. It's the tale of a sadistic lawyer who seduces his young Secretary into work-hour
submission. Based on author Mary Gaitskill's short story, the film is a poignant, post-feminist portrait
of heroine Lee Holloway, whose masochism leads her from mental asylums to finding love in sexual servitude.
It's also a meditation on lonely girls in shit jobs, dirty old men, sinister suits, deranged submissives,
dysfunctional nuclear families and master-and-slave couples. Even with director Steven Shainberg's surreal
style, Maggie's subversive Secretary feels so genuine, you almost have to wonder.
 Blame it on how the actress
gives good cinema even in real life. We're sitting at Florent, the Meat Packing District's staple diner -- her favorite
nighttime haunt -- and the scene's too perfect: While she's gushing about running away to Paris, Edith Piaf croons over
the sound system; when the conversation becomes heated, an enormous thunderstorm hits the city.
All night, she's squirming in her seat. She's excited. In a month, she'll be emerging in a way that few female
leads have done since Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon. Still, she's nervous. Midway through the interview she
breaks down and checks her cellphone voicemail to see if her agent has called about a part that she's eager to land.
Taking in an impressive lungful of smoke, she deletes messages one-by-one and pouts -- nothing she wants to hear about.
She sighs and shrugs. Then she decides we need dessert.
"We can walk to Magnolia [Bakery]!" she exclaims.
I look outside. It's pouring. Hard. We don't have umbrellas. But she's looking at me with those eyes,
repeating the word cupcakes -- how does anyone say no to a girl like this?
Ask Jake Gyllenhaal for five words to describe his sister, and he can't come up with anything. Chuckling, he asks,
"Can I have six?"
"She. Is. Not. As. She. Seems."
Maggie Gyllenhaal was born in the Lower East Side on November 16, 1977, to writer/producer Naomi Foner and director
Stephen Gyllenhaal. Shortly afterward, they moved to Los Angeles, where she and her younger brother Jake attended the
premier L.A. prep school Harvard-Westlake.
"I like to fantasize about being more rebellious than I probably actually was," she recalls of her high school days,
admitting to an early-'90s thrift-store aesthetic, dyed hair and all. "But there was this rich L.A. thing going on,
and I did rebel against that."
Early on, it was apparent that acting was her route. "She paved the path," says Jake. "Even when we were really little
she'd stage things at family [events]. She would do Cats and put me on the side licking out of a fucking bowl!"
Both brainy Gyllenhaals attended Columbia University. Until she graduated in 1999 with a B.A. in literature and eastern
religion, Maggie made Williamsburg her home -- a $550-a-month loft she shared with a painter boyfriend. Living in
New York didn't stop an intense sort of sibling rivalry. During the past few years, when Jake topped Maggie with his
It-Boy status in movies like October Sky, Bubble Boy and the cult-hit Donnie Darko, conflict ran deep amongst the
Royal Gyllenhaals.
"I jumped into it real fast, and she was like, 'Whoa, what the hell!'" Jake says.
"We're definitely competitive, but we're very open about it," Maggie admits. "It's also the darkest thing in our
relationship."
"We're each other's best and definitely worst critic," Jake adds.
Ask Jake what it's like to see sis sexed up in Secretary, and he's only got one word: "Hard."
 At the West Village sugar-shack
Magnolia Bakery, Maggie has several chomps into a vanilla cupcake before we've paid. It's still pouring, but she
wants to sit outside. She makes a dash for the awning outside her beloved local Marc Jacobs store and plops down
on the drenched concrete. Within seconds, we are both gooey with soggy frosting and sidewalk soup. She's so wholesome
it makes you want to pry. I tell her I want to know her secrets, the bad ones.
"I love musicals!" she offers. "That's a secret. I'm ashamed of it. But My Fair Lady, ohhhh...." She ecstatically
licks frosting off her fingers. Think dirt, I tell myself. Um, any food issues?
"I don't think it's a huge problem for me. There was the one time when I first started as an actress when I got
really skinny, and I got a bunch of parts. I was a little bit confused by that." Then softly under her breath, she
murmurs, "When I did Secretary, to be honest, before I got naked I got nervous, and I was eating really carefully."
She self-consciously lights a cigarette. "And I've been trying to quit this! I really think smoking is terrible!
I just told my parents [I smoked] for the first time ever. They care about me so much, so it's nice for them to
know things that aren't so good about me." She laughs to herself. "I guess I was always a little bit innocent. Although..."
Aha! Here it comes.
"Boys. I was so into boys."
For the record, Maggie is dating someone in the industry but insists she "can't talk about it," as if she's worried
about jinxing it. I ask her if she feels confident with men, if she feels sexy. "It's funny, even today I get
feedback on a movie that I want to do where they aren't sure if I'm sexy enough. I used to get feedback like that
when I first started acting, and it was accurate then because I was afraid of [acting sexy]." She shrugs, taking a
long, frustrated drag. "But, I mean, after [Secretary], I worked out some stuff."
As Paper's photo shoot begins the next day, Maggie runs up to me, half-dressed in a glittery robe. "I won an award!"
she breathlessly exclaims, referring to the IFP Gotham Best Breakthrough prize for her work in Secretary. She
blissfully leans against the wall. "My first award!"
We start talking about the Oscars, all the what-ifs a girl fantasizes about -- who to take, what to say, what
to wear.
She looks at me square in the eye, declaring the only definite: "Comfortable shoes."
Maggie has played the girl you're not supposed to notice in dozens of films -- Jake's almost-invisible sister in
Donnie Darko, the "best friend" in 40 Days and 40 Nights, a caricature in John Waters' post-apocalyptic freak
show Cecil B. Demented and one of the girls in Penny Marshall's estro-vaganza Riding in Cars with Boys. But you've
never seen her like this.
"I was the first girl who auditioned for Secretary," she says. Even when Maggie just utters the word Secretary,
there's conflict. She's both excited and terrified, eager and unsure.
Still, she's quick to reveal that she used her past exploits in preparing for the role -- her only shit job,
busing tables in an upscale Massachusetts restaurant, offered her some insights into the world of 9-to-5 naughtiness.
"I had an affair with the chef! I thought about it a lot when I made the movie," she confesses. "He would call me in
from working on the restaurant floor and give me spoonfuls of whatever he was making."
 The filmmaking process has
kept her wary of romanticizing the movie's message. "I did and I didn't have a lot of freedom in Secretary," she says.
"There were some times I would say to Steve [Shainberg], 'Listen, I'm a 23-year-old girl. I'm playing a 23-year-old girl.
The experience that I am having is accurate.'"
Then there's her co-star, James Spader, being the big S to Maggie's M. Spader plays Maggie's lawyer-boss Mr. Grey.
I assume she's not holding her co-star's controversial career against him -- I mention Crash, and she stares blankly,
leaving me to awkwardly sum up "the car-wreck fuck-fest" that she never saw. "I think he's very sexy, but he was kinda
always acting a little bit like Mr. Grey on the set. I ran into him the other day on the street, and I felt like, wow,
I don't even know you."
I ask Maggie about the Spader treatment -- Secretary's spanking motif -- and all she can do is wearily moan. "It's
one thing to spank someone, I guess, but it's another thing to do it 500 times, to keep shooting at different angles.
I had no idea what effect it would have on me. After the first time [Spader] did it, I thought I would just lose it.
And we had to shoot it all day. Afterward, I sat down with [him] for a second, and I burst out crying. He would see
me uncomfortable, and he would come over and say, 'What do you need?' and would use his James Spader star power to
fix it for me." She bites her lip, a smile creeping on. "And that was very Mr. Grey and Lee, definitely part of that
whole thing."
Aside from the spanking scenarios, there are masturbation and full-frontal nude scenes with Maggie -- never Spader
-- that are a risk for any actress, much less someone doing it for the first time. "There's one scene in Secretary
that's hard in terms of nudity, where my breasts are in the shot and it's kind of gratuitous," she says. "I'm in
a bathtub and he's washing my hair, and you just don't need to see my tits, you just don't need to. And I felt
slightly taken advantage of in that situation."
I ask her if she thinks Shainberg exploited her. She shakes her head. "We argued about nudity," she confesses,
her voice rising. "There were things I said I won't do. I will not do a scene where I'm chained to the desk, topless,
and I'm heaving. I'm not going to use my body in that way. But I also think I was so involved that I wasn't coming at
it totally objectively, and I think in that scene I conceded in a way that maybe in retrospect I wish I hadn't."
Just when it looks like Maggie might lose her composure, she starts to crack up; we make a few porn jokes, and
everything is all right again. "There was a moment when the DP was taking a light reading on my crotch. And I
was like, 'What the fuck are you doing?'" Maggie howls and then smiles sweetly. "You know, the one of my hands
getting down in my underwear." Oh, that shot. Of course. I smile nervously at her.
I tell her I really can't imagine another girl playing Lee. She shakes her head, again the head shake of a girl
who has survived her share of Hollywood hurdles to get to this: Her Moment. Her laugh is soft, both proud and
weary, when she says, "Neither can I!"
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