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The Library
The Telegraph Magazine - February 14th 2004
Girl On Top
Written by Chris Campion | Photography by Jack Chuck
 Maggie
Gyllenhaal first grabbed our attention in the S&M comedy 'Secretary'. But when it comes to dealing with
Hollywood's big players she is far from submissive she tells Chris Campion.
Cute, coquettish ingenues are a dime a dozen in Hollywood, but Maggie Gyllenhaal bucks against type.
Self-determined, she is a young woman whose screen presence owes more to her dizzy charm and keen mind than her
girl-next-door looks.
Her daring performance in the sex comedy Secretary, a surprise UK box office hit last year,
grossing more than £1 million, certainly raised eyebrows. She was impressive as a disturbed girl whose capacity
for self-harm is supplanted by a predilection for sadomasochistic game play with her lawyer boss (James Spader).
The film's success not only secured a reputation for Gyllenhaal as the It girl of indie cinema but shot her into
the big league.
Now, at 26, she finds herself (alongside Kirsten Dunst and Julia Stiles) in a supporting role
to Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile. Set in the 1950s, it's a studio-made chick-flick about a liberal art teacher
attempting to free her students from the wifely roles drummed into them at their all-girls college. Gyllenhaal
plays Giselle, a free-spirited Jewish student who makes a point of flouting etiquette by embarking on a public
affair with a male teacher. That she is following her role in Secretary - as a girl trying to find a way to be
comfortable with her body - by playing somebody who is entirely comfortable with herself seems to be a choice
made not out of happenstance but by design.
'In some ways, all the characters I've played this year are connected,' Gyllenhaal cheerfully
admits when we meet in London. 'They're all very much informed by the thing that came before them. I think my
attraction to the characters [arises] when there's something unconscious at work, something that I need to workthrough
or pay attention to that playing a role in the film allows me to fulfil. Something about Giselle in this movie appealed
to me immediately.'
Her conviction must have come as something of a shock to the filmmakers, as she was originally
called in to audition for another part entirely: a strait-laced student who harbours ambitions to be a lawyer but
opts for life as a housewife, the role eventually filled by Julia Stiles. 'I didn't want to play that part at all,'
she continues. 'I only wanted to play Giselle because I could see all the traps that you could fall into by playing
her as a "loose" woman.'
To Gyllenhaal's credit, she plays Giselle with an understated honesty - sadly lacking from the
rest of the film, which conveys with sledgehammer subtlety its message about the dangers of nonconformity for women
in the 1950s.
'Part of the reason I was attracted to her,' Gyllenhaal continues, 'was because, I guess, to play
somebody who feels confident in herself as a sexy, beautiful woman is more of a risk. Unless you're a great beauty,
in which case obviously you're not risking anything. But, you know, to play somebody who feels comfortable and
beautiful is hard. It really is.'
This conversational trait of Gyllenhaal's, a mad rush of ideas that contains a kernel of her
unconscious thoughts, has been perfectly described elsewhere as a 'sweet stumble of self-revelation'. When
Gyllenhaal sauntered into the suite at the Dorchester a little earlier and introduced herself, there was little
in her bearing to suggest a lack of confidence. She had arrived that morning from Los Angeles, where she has just
completed a run of the acclaimed playwright Tony Kushner's latest work, Homebody/Kabul. Despite the jetlag she's
immensely chatty and eager to engage but becomes frustrated when the right word won't come. 'I wish my brain was
working,' she laughs.
Turned out head to toe in a sober uniform of black skirt, stockings and a cashmere sweater,
she seems to have retained the conservative dress code of her role in the play - a bolshie British student
searching for her mother who has gone missing in Afghanistan. Her hair, cut short and tied back, adds a tomboyish aspect.
Before Homebody/Kabul, she worked with the director Sidney Lumet on Strip Search, a
television film about an American student in China accused of terrorist activities who is arrested, detained and interrogated - a move that illustrates her tendency to choose roles that satiate her conscience as well as her subconscious, undoubtedly a direct consequence of her upbringing by politically active parents. Swedish-American director Stephen Gyllenhaal and Jewish screenwriter Naomi Foner are a filmmaking team who specialise in worthy dramas such as Losing Isaiah, a 1995 mixed-race adoption story starring Halle Berry.
Gyllenhaal plays down the unconventional childhood that she and her 23-year-old brother
Jake (also an actor) enjoyed - 'I don't want to romanticise it because in a lot of ways we were just like
any other family' - but it's clear that the circles her parents moved in must have brought an interesting
mix of people across the family threshold. Foner based her 1993 Oscar-nominated screenplay for Running on
Empty, about a pair of former 1960s radicals on the run with their children, on people she knew. Lumet (who
directed the film) and Paul Newman were family friends. Foner in particular has deep ties to an entrenched
community of Hollywood liberals. She's a member of America Coming Together, a political action committee
fronted by Hollywood leftists and backed by George Soros.
The Gyllenhaals' big, rambling family home in Los Angeles was regularly used to house
benefits for various political groups when the children were growing up. 'I remember that Isabel Allende
came to do a reading at our house once for a Medical Aid for El Salvador evening.' Gyllenhaal says. 'Just
as she was supposed to read the lights went out and so she read by candlelight in the living-room.'
Such is the Gyllenhaals' status as political nobility in Hollywood that the entire
family was honoured at an American Civil Liberties Union dinner last year for its contribution to the
advancement of civil liberties. 'The award really went to my mother who's been really active with the
ACLU in a lot of ways,' defers Gyllenhaal. 'But I think Jake and I were included because we'd had such
explosive years.' Both the Gyllenhaal children have absorbed the political conviction and beliefs of
their parents. But while Jake has opted for the softly-softly approach to stardom in films such as
Donnie Darko and The Good Girl, his sister is headstrong and bullish about how she wants her work to
be perceived. When she talks about film it's often in terms of their 'agenda' or 'intentions', of
characters who 'feel entitled to a radical way of thinking'.
'Movies have the power to affect so many people, millions of people,' she gushes.
'It's such a powerful medium and I think it's a shame that these big movies often say nothing.'
This idealism also drives her desire to be considered a collaborator in the filmmaking
process rather than just a cog in the machine. 'Some people think of actors that way and some don't,' she
says. 'And I can't understand the ones that don't. Just imagine making a film with a hundred minds and hearts
and bodies as opposed to one; it's exponentially more interesting that way.'
Yet she is also far from naive about the practicalities of working this way within the
studio system. Even she seems surprised at the amount of input she had concerning the direction of her
character in Mona Lisa Smile. 'There were a couple of things that were really important for me to shift,
so I told them; but I thought, "Nothing's going to happen." A week later, I got a call from the producer
inviting me to her house for breakfast. I thought she was going to fire me! But she invited me over to
tell her, the writer and [the director] Mike Newell the changes I thought should be made. I just couldn't
believe that.'
Paradoxically, the freedom she was given provoked another response in her, one that
dovetailed with her role as the 'bad girl' in the movie. 'If there was a line I didn't like, I wouldn't
ask permission to change it,' she says with a frisson of glee. 'I would just change it and see what happened.
We went to charm school as preparation for the movie. I was so excited and interested and curious because it's
not like anything I ever grew up with. But I learnt nothing, so I got bored and decided to practise trying to
be provocative in charm school. I would chew gum in school.'
One gets the distinct impression that Gyllenhaal was probably the class swot rather than
the school rebel. Despite the ups and downs of her parents' freelance careers in Hollywood - 'there were times
when they were the belles of the ball and times when they were really struggling,' she says - the children's
education never suffered. Both were enrolled in the exclusive Harvard-Westlake school and moved on to Columbia
University (where their mother had gone before them). Gyllenhaal graduated in 2000 with a degree in Literature
and Eastern Religion. She took roles in theatrical productions throughout both high school and college simply for
the joy of learning the craft but, by her own admission, took it very seriously. 'In retrospect, it was probably
kind of funny to be playing Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at 16 and taking it that
seriously,' she giggles.
Her first screen role was a bit part in her father's 1993 movie Waterland, starring
Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack. She also secured small roles in a run of television films before landing
her first character part in 2000 in Cecil B Demented, John Waters's satire about a hapless gang of terrorist
filmmakers who launch an assault on Hollywood. Gyllenhaal played Raven, a Satan-worshipping make-up artist. 'I
couldn't figure out why he wanted me to be in it,' she says, sounding genuinely surprised that she was cast. 'I
remember my audition was terrible. He must have felt that I was a kindred spirit or something.'
'I just thought she was a good actress,' Waters says. 'She seemed real. She's sweet, sexy
and great-looking but at the same time she's never going to be an ingenue. She's an ingenue with character.
And that's hard to find! In the same way that she played a sweet Satanist in my movie and a sweet masochist
[in Secretary], I guess we like to see her turning what's normally thought of as something villainous into a heroine.'
In fact, Gyllenhaal seems to find this process more than a bit confusing. 'It's hard for
me to tell whether the things that I'm feeling are being affected by the work I'm doing all day or whether
the work I'm doing all day is being affected by the things I'm feeling,' she says. 'But it also feels so
natural. It's my work, my job, so of course it's affecting me. It just means that I learn a lot from the movies I do.'
When Gyllenhaal says, 'Everything changed for me after Secretary', she's not just talking
about the cachet that a hit indie movie added to her status in the industry. She admitted in interviews at the
time to dumping her boyfriend of five years after the shoot. The emotional complexity of the role forced her
to rethink the way she approached her work.
'With Secretary, I had the script completely planned out in terms of how it would feel.
But the moments in the movie that I'm most proud of are the ones that I couldn't order intellectually, and
that has really shaped the way that I feel about acting. I don't really worry about putting up clear boundaries
between my life and my work now. I think I want them to move freely.'
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