Interview: Maggie Gyllenhaal

By Susan Thea Posnock

We all have ways of working through trauma in our
lives and using those trials to learn and grow. For
Maggie Gyllenhaal, acting is a part of that process.

Like many New Yorkers and Americans, she struggled to
come to grips with the tragedy of Sept. 11. That
included a backlash when she made comments about the
attacks she says were misinterpreted to sound as if
she felt New York and America deserved to be attacked,
a sentiment she calls inconceivable. (While doing
press for the 9/11-themed film The Great New
Wonderful in April 2005 she was quoted saying the
United States was “responsible in some way” for the
attacks.) Playing Allison Jimeno—whose husband Will
was a Port Authority officer pulled alive from the
rubble—in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center
helped her come to terms with the event and her own
reaction to it.

In Laurie Collyer’s indie film SherryBaby,
she takes on the morally complex title role, a woman
just out of prison who must face the child she had
while still a child herself, as well as the siren call
of drug addiction.

Gyllenhaal, 29, also shined with fine work as Zee in
the computer-animated Monster House along
with parts in Stranger than Fiction and
Trust the Man. She’s deservedly up for a
drama lead actress Golden Globe for
SherryBaby and at this point is probably a
dark horse for an Oscar nomination. But perhaps more
significant than all those performances or accolades
was the birth of daughter Ramona, which she celebrated
with her fiancé, actor Peter Sarsgaard, in October.

I spoke with Gyllenhaal just as she was emerging from
what she called the “baby cocoon,” about her marquee
roles, her influence as a celebrity and the impact of
her biggest role yet: being a mom.

OscarWatch: What drew you to the roles in
SherryBaby and World Trade Center?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: I don't usually choose roles or
characters from an intellectual place in me. I think I
choose from a more instinctive place and sometimes
I'll just read something and I'll just know, not
necessarily I can do it, but I want to see what that's
like to go and have that experience. And if I don't
have that feeling about a character, I've found it’s
probably not a good idea for me to play it.

OW: What was it about Sherry in particular?

MG: I feel like when you see a movie with someone like
Sherry in it who does things that are morally
complicated and painful to a lot of people and can
seem very selfish and lost, I think watching a movie
like that is a way of practicing. And by practicing I
mean it’s a way of practicing being compassionate. I
feel like that's an amazing thing to ask an audience.

OW: You manage to make her likable even though she
makes some pretty questionable decisions.

MG: The one thing I knew intellectually and the one
thing I kind of had in my back pocket as I was working
on that character was she's in such dire straits and
things are so bad for her that she doesn't have the
luxury to feel the pain and the hurt and the anger.
Otherwise she'd just completely lose it because it's
so bad. I think all she has really, the only
thing that she's armed with as she gets out of prison,
is this kind of naive and fierce hopefulness. So in
every scene that I did I sort of thought, “How is this
good, how is this working for me, how is this hot, how
is this right morally?” All the scenes could have been
played crying through them [or thinking] “How is this
horrible, how does this feel awful?” I really tried to
go in the other direction.

OW: I understand you went to halfway house programs,
drug recovery and parole meetings while doing research
for the role. How did that help shape your portrayal?

MG: I didn't have a pen and paper in my hand and I
wasn't reading a lot of books about people who've been
in prison. It was just being in those places. For
three weeks before [we shot the film] I spent every
day in these halfway houses and with these women,
smoking cigarettes with them and sitting all day on
the couches they were sitting on. [I took] the train
to New Jersey and sat with this woman for two hours
waiting for her parole officer to see her. All of
those things kind of got inside me and I think they
were my rehearsal.

OW: What about the role of Allison Jimeno in World
Trade Center?

MG: I feel looking at the movie and looking at my work
in it like there was something about 9/11, my feelings
about 9/11, my response to it, my political response,
my emotional response, my intellectual response, all
of it that was undigested. I think it was very hard
for most people to digest and I guess I felt like it
was sort of half way down my throat. By doing this
movie and playing this part, and then doing the press
for it, I basically sat for however many weeks and
talked about 9/11. I talked about people's response to
it and people's fears about a movie being made about
it, and it was really interesting to me. That was a
real part of my experience. But I think it really
helped me digest it. I got to sort of live through
things that I had imagined many times.

OW: You talk about being provocative, especially in
America today. Did the backlash from your 9/11
comments change your attitude at all?

MG: When I first heard about what was going on I was
really upset, really scared and really confused and
hurt. That lasted for a long time and it did scare me
and make me quiet. I remember doing press for
Happy Endings [in 2005] and everyone was
asking me about it and I was terrified.

Then when the press came up for World Trade
Center I re-examined it. I looked at myself and
thought, “You know I'm not afraid to talk about this.
I’m actually really excited to talk about this.
Anybody who wants to can ask about what I said, what I
meant, how I felt about it, what was misinterpreted,
and how I could have said it better.

So I guess my feeling is it did scare me and it did
silence me for a little while. But in the end I don't
think it changed my feelings about saying what's
important and what I believe. I guess I wish that I'd
been gentler about it and said it in a way that was
easier to hear.

OW: Do you think being able to be heard on different
topics is something that's important about being a
"celebrity"?

MG: I think it's very important. I remember when all
of this 9/11 stuff happened people were saying, “You
know she's an actress and why do we care about what
she has to say about politics and I thought, ‘then why
is this being blown up this way?’” I think whether
people want to listen to what I have to say or not is
completely up to them and I totally understand if they
don't. But I think when you're doing press all the
time, and you're walking through press lines and
people are asking you what kind of lip-gloss do you
want this season, that I almost feel like it's a
responsibility to have a point of view about what's
going on. I mean that's how I was raised.

OW: Motherhood is a central aspect of both Sherry and
Allison. Now that you are a mother, has it changed
your own perspective on that relationship and how you
might approach the mother/child dynamic in future
films?

MG: Yeah, absolutely. Sherry was a baby when she
became a mother. I remember going and doing some Q&A's
for SherryBaby and being really pregnant and
thinking people are probably scared [laughs].

When I did that movie I completely believed in Sherry
and I believed she was a fantastic mother and that she
was a mother in a more awake, aware and innovative way
[than the other characters]. She was talking to her
daughter in a more truthful way than they were capable
of and I really believed in her.

When I look at it now of course I see how she's so
deeply flawed, but in a way I didn't really see that
when I was making it. So yes, of course it changes
everything to have a child and to think about the ways
that I imagined having a child would feel before. But
at the same time I don't know if there is anything in
particular I would have changed about those
performances.

OW: Has it given you new perspective on things like
award recognition? How important is that to you?

MG: It's complicated because I think, especially with
a new baby, it’s not the most important thing. And yet
when you're recognized for work that you're really
proud of it feels really good. Especially on a movie
like SherryBaby which really was a risk,
which was so hard to make, and I was involved in years
before we actually made it. For a movie like that to
get some validation makes me feel like taking that
kind of risk again.

OW: Overall, how do you feel the birth of your
daughter has changed what you want out of life and out
of your acting?

MG: I think that's an impossible question to answer. I
really don't have enough objectivity to delve into
that yet, but it’s changed me hugely. I don't even
really know how, but it’s blown my mind.

*Originally posted on OscarWatch (now Awards Daily)