Spectrum - January 16th 2004

Agent Provocateur
Written by James Mottram | Photography by Chris Ashford

IF EVER there was an apt title for a devotional website, it is ‘The Dangerous Maggie Gyllenhaal’. Ever since she bent over to "assume the position" in the S&M romance Secretary, she has been worthy of the adjective like few other indie actresses. Not that you would know it from trawling through this particular site’s pages, with its selection of coquettish photographs suggesting innocence rather than experience. One particularly telling shot has her stretching the grey jacket that she’s wearing up over her nose, so that just one aquamarine eye and its accompanying brow can be seen peeping out through the tomboy bowl of brown hair. You can almost hear the photographer requesting a cheeky or impish look - anything but dangerous.

Frequently told at past auditions that she wasn’t sexy enough, Gyllenhaal, now 27, certainly doesn’t fit the comfortable stereotype of the well-manicured Hollywood starlet. Despite spending most of her formative years in Los Angeles, where her film-maker parents flirted with the industry, she isn’t blonde, bronzed or bubbly. And although she endured a stint at charm school, where she was sent to research her role in Mona Lisa Smile, she’s an anarchic mix of girl-next-door and Bohemian chic. As one interviewer noted, "She’s a lanky, knobbly-boned girl who makes hunching sexy."

Today, politely smiling her way through publicity duties for her latest film, Criminal, she is dressed in uniform black. She doesn’t turn heads when she walks through the door. But by the time she sits down, you can’t help but be drawn into her face, with its flawless skin and quizzical eyes. She has a soft and creamy voice, its West Coast lilt entirely removed by her current life in New York’s West Village. Accessible rather than aloof, though it takes her a while to thaw, she is as unpretentious as they come.

If Gyllenhaal is dangerous, it’s because she is aware of her own sexuality, and knows how to use it provocatively. But in her puritan homeland, this equates to a major breach of security. When she made Secretary, she admitted that she was "dying" to tackle feminists who objected to the role - she plays a self-mutilating masochist who becomes embroiled with her lawyer boss (played by James Spader).

Vowing to change "old-school feminist mantras" that are no longer "totally accurate or helpful", although she has no wish to conform to conventional wisdom, Gyllenhaal is not about to fall into line with the sisterhood either. On a par with Catherine Deneuve’s role as a prostitute in Belle de Jour, Secretary is the sort of film that could have finished a career as quickly as it started one. The only reason it didn’t cause hundreds of Hollywood divas to run screaming from the auditions is because Gyllenhaal happened to be the first - and last - to be considered for the role.

Apart from winning her a Golden Globe nomination, Secretary brought her an instant cult following from those that matter. "The most adorable ones [that come up to me] are 19-year-old girls," she says, while taking delicate sips from a glass of mineral water.

"They’re like I was when I was that age - cute little punks. They’re all shaky when they come and say something. That movie was about ‘Who cares what anybody thinks it is supposed to look like or feel like when you’re in love? Who cares what someone else says sex is supposed to be, or love or a relationship is supposed to be?’ It doesn’t matter. That’ll only hurt you. What will not hurt you is trying to find out what you think it is, which is a message I want those girls to have. I want them to love that movie. I feel really proud to be behind that message."

Gyllenhaal was cast in the role while performing in a Los Angeles-based production of Patrick Marber’s psychosexual play Closer, in which she played the stripper role that Natalie Portman performs in the current screen version. It was this that liberated her, paved the way for Secretary and unleashed her libido on unsuspecting casting directors. During one week of the play’s run, she had a series of movie auditions and scored at every one. While she had previously been restricted to bit parts in straitlaced films such as Riding in Cars with Boys, she suddenly found herself cast as the free spirit. Look at the two Charlie Kaufman movies she pops up in: Adaptation sees her play the confident make-up artist, while Confessions of a Dangerous Mind casts her as an early girlfriend to Gong Show host Chuck Barris.

If both blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em roles hinted at what was to come in Secretary, Gyllenhaal now appears to have come full circle. In next month’s Criminal, a remake of Argentinian con-artist caper Nine Queens, she plays Valerie, the film’s silver-suited femme fatale, who becomes involved with her shady brother (John C Reilly) and his partner (Diego Luna) in swindling some antique currency from Scots actor Peter Mullan. "When I read it," Gyllenhaal says, "the thing that interested me about it first was the girl and the sting movie - that femme fatale façade where nothing is ever out of place, and what’s really happening is so far underneath and expertly covered.

"I started to feel when I was making the movie - and this is always how it happens for me with acting - that I couldn’t keep up that façade. I’d be too angry, too upset or my f**king shoes would hurt. Those are not usually the characteristics of the femme fatale, but I loved that. Valerie isn’t really that good at playing that role. She’s a woman who works in a hotel and has a brother she can’t communicate with. She’s playing at being something that she isn’t, and I really like the way she fails."

Rather like Chloë Sevigny, the one working actress in America currently able to rival her for integrity and daring, Gyllenhaal moves in the hippest circles. She featured alongside her brother Jake in the cult hit Donnie Darko, and it was she who introduced Jake to his on-off girlfriend, Kirsten Dunst, after the two became friends while making Mona Lisa Smile. In the past she has said that she and her brother are competitive, that it’s "the darkest thing in our relationship". It took two screenings of Secretary before Jake could applaud his sister’s work - and he had reportedly squealed to their parents about the erotic content of the script. When I put it to him that both of them had undertaken Hollywood movies at the same time - her with Mona Lisa Smile, him with the eco-blockbuster The Day after Tomorrow - he had sniffed and said, "She doesn’t know what a Hollywood film is!"

So does this sibling sass still exist? "I don’t think there is too much rivalry between us now," she says. "There was when we first started out, but in a way that’s pretty normal, like any brother and sister. We were just getting started.

"We want the same thing: to have the power to choose to do any movie you want. But we’re going about it in different ways, so it’s hard to be competitive. He’s right - I have chosen to do little independent movies. What I want, ultimately, is to be able to do whatever I want to do. He took a different route; he said, ‘I’m going to do a big movie, because I’ve found one that I can relate to.’ Because we’ve gone about it slightly differently, it makes it easier not to be competitive. But we don’t spend that much time talking about our work; we talk about our lives."

As much as she plays it down, not wishing to "romanticise" it, her home life must have been a rich source of inspiration. Born in New York’s Lower East Side, she moved to Los Angeles when her parents’ careers began to blossom. Her father, Stephen, is a director - notably of Paris Trout and the 1992 adaptation of Graham Swift’s Waterland, which gave his daughter her first acting credit, opposite Jeremy Irons. Her mother is Naomi Foner, the screenwriter who penned the 1988 Oscar-nominated Running on Empty, about two 1960s radicals on the run with their children, as well as Losing Isaiah, a mixed-race adoption story that her husband directed. Family friends include Paul Newman and Sidney Lumet, who directed Running on Empty.

An active member of the political action committee America Coming Together, Foner was recently honoured at an American Civil Liberties Union dinner for her work. Gyllenhaal says she remembers Isabel Allende, the author and exiled niece of Salvador Allende, the overthrown Chilean president, coming to the family’s rambling LA home to do a reading as part of a fundraising evening for El Salvador. "Just as she was supposed to start reading, the lights failed, and so she read by candlelight in the living-room."

While her brother is notably outspoken on environmental issues, Gyllenhaal has used her roles (though not necessarily in the cinema) to express her political beliefs. On stage she played a bolshie British student searching for her mother, who has gone missing in Afghanistan, in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul. And in the television film Strip Search, she played an American student accused of terrorist activities in China.

Needless to say, artistic expression has always been high on the agenda in the Gyllenhaal household. "I was always doing plays at school," she recalls. "When I was a kid my mother took me to an acting class, and I used to do all these plays around the house."

Acting classes really fired her imagination. "It was similar to the way it feels now - really deep daydreaming," she says. "It was the most effective way to express the things that I wanted to express."

Being raised by a couple of film-makers also left its mark. "I do think it has influenced me. I really honour a good script. I think it is almost impossible to make a good movie without a good script. I don’t mean a perfect script, just one that’s rooted in real human behaviour, which is a rare thing to find. I learned a lot about acting from my dad, but I’ve started to find my way of working, finding my own sense of what works for me."

Although well aware that her life has been one of privilege (the Gyllenhaal children attended the prestigious LA prep school Harvard-Westlake), she admits she went through a rebellious phase in the early 1990s, all dyed hair and charity-shop cool. "I like to fantasise about being more rebellious than I probably was," she says, sweeping the hair from her eyes. This is someone, after all, who also confesses to a guilty passion for musicals, and My Fair Lady in particular. Yet she did rebel against "the rich LA thing" around her. While accepted into New York’s Columbia University to major in literature (with a minor in eastern religions), she lived modestly with her former boyfriend, a painter, in a 550-a-month loft in the less-than-salubrious neighbourhood of Williamsburg.

It was when she graduated in 1999 that her career took off, albeit at one step behind her brother’s. She played a Satan-worshipping make-up artist named Raven in Cecil B DeMented, the film-industry satire by John Waters. But it was Secretary that made her a star. Neither her agent nor her family wanted her to get naked for the role. She ignored them, bolstered by her own sense of bravado and spurred on by the belief that everyone is a masochist in one way or another. She points to the fact that she still struggles to quit smoking, which, she says, can cause as much physical damage as any act of self-mutilation.

Just as Donnie Darko did for her brother, Secretary opened the door to a wider world. "It changed me completely," she says. "Before that I was just trying to work and get a job. I was always pretty discerning, but my job at the time was to take something that was all right and try to infuse it with something that is human and good and that would be interesting to me. After Secretary, I had many roles offered to me, and it was hard to turn down things that two months before I would have been thrilled to do. It helped me be brave in the choices I made."

So why pick something as anodyne as Mona Lisa Smile, an ‘inspirational’ Julia Roberts vehicle in which Gyllenhaal played one of her pupils? Pointing out that she shot it before Secretary came out, she explains her motives. "In that movie, I thought, ‘I like this part. If I get it, I could do something interesting with it.’ Now I don’t know if that’s enough for me to do a movie. I want it to be about something that matters to me. I want to make sure the director is really compatible with me. That’s really important. I have learned through making some mistakes how discerning I have to be in order to be happy. For me, what it has become about is choosing things that will force me to grow in some way in order to play the role."

If Secretary had one lasting effect on her, it was that she ended the romance with her artist boyfriend of five years shortly after the shoot was over, concerned about the impact the film would have on their relationship. "I don’t really worry about putting up clear boundaries between my life and my work now," she says. And that must be good news for her latest boyfriend, actor Peter Sarsgaard, whom she has been seeing for three years. His stand-out performances in films such as Boys Don’t Cry and the recent Garden State show he shares Gyllenhaal’s passion for pushing buttons when it comes to work. He sounds supportive, aware of the fragile state acting can leave you in. "Whenever I feel out of place and not listened to, I call Peter and say, ‘I’m so unhappy. This is so hard.’ And he has the objectivity to say, ‘Maggie, you sound just like the girl you’re playing in the movie.’"

When I ask if she’s bothered about people gossiping about her love life, she shrugs and says, "I’ve had a boyfriend for a long time, so there’s not a lot of drama around it."

The drama, it seems, is all in her work. She has no fewer than five new films in the pipeline. Most notably, she is part of the ensemble for Trust the Man, a Manhattan-set romantic comedy with Julianne Moore and Billy Crudup. She also has Happy Endings, directed by Don Roos, who made the sharp-witted The Opposite of Sex. Starring alongside Steve Coogan, she plays a character who sleeps with a young gay man before falling in love with his father.

"I like to see movies that make me challenge, in some way, the way I look at the world, my ethical system of living," she explains, "so I like to make movies that do that to other people too.

"I think writers and directors often make little judgements about people in their movies. But I like to really avoid those judgements at all costs," she says. Well, it seems that ‘dangerous’ doesn’t even begin to describe her.

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