Maggie Gyllenhaal

Maggie Gyllenhaal at the Tribeca Film Festival. (AP photo)

Actress criticized for questioning Sept. 11 attacks

Last Updated Tue, 26 Apr 2005 19:25:47 EDT
CBC Arts

NEW YORK - The website of actress Maggie Gyllenhaal has been flooded with negative posts after she suggested the U.S. is partly to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Gyllenhaal, 27, said in an interview last week that America "is responsible in some way" for the suicide skyjackings.

Her comments came prior to the debut of The Great New Wonderful, a film about New Yorkers coping with the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001.

Her official site was choked with critical posts, prompting the editor to turn off the electronic forum.

"I have taken away the comments system, because it's gotten too outta hand," the editor wrote.

In a statement, the star of such films as Secretary and Donnie Darko said Sept. 11 was "an occasion to be brave enough to ask some serious questions about America's role in the world. Because it is always useful as individuals or nations to ask how we may have knowingly or unknowingly contributed to this conflict."

"Not to have the courage to ask these questions of ourselves is to betray the victims of 9/11," she added, saying she grieves for "everyone who suffered and everyone who died in the catastrophe."

In another message, the site's editor stressed that the young performer did not say the U.S. deserved the attacks.

Gyllenhaal plays Emma in The Great New Wonderful, one of a number of movies soon to land in theatres or currently in production that touch on Sept. 11.

It had its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival, which was established by actor Robert De Niro to help boost the economy of Manhattan after the attacks. The event runs until May 1.

Gyllenhaal is the older sister of actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who was in Iqaluit for last week's Earth Day protest.

02/11/04

Interview with Maggie Gyllenhaal

Maggie Gyllenhaal's role as a masochistic secretary hit the headlines last year. Now the single-minded actress is stealing the show from Julia Roberts in her first big-budget movie

Sean O'Hagan, interviewer
Sunday January 18, 2004
The Observer (London)

If you live in London, you may have seen Maggie Gyllenhaal of late, but chances are you may not have recognised her. She is adorning bus stops and billboards across the capital in the poster for Secretary, a well-received American independent movie that was released in cinemas last year, and is now making an appearance on DVD. In the film she plays a masochistic young woman called Lee; on the poster, Lee is pictured bent over, in short skirt, seamed stockings and high heels, the words 'Assume the position' stamped across her elevated backside. I guess this is what marketing men call 'in your face' advertising.

'It was kind of strange when the movie came out on DVD in America,' she says, looking visibly perturbed, 'because that's when I started to get really recognised on the street. I mean, I'm not famous enough to be hassled by fans, but just for a moment, the recognition level really spiralled, and I had a little taste of that unreal world. I was kind of glad I live in New York and not Los Angeles, where the hype and attention can get really scary.'

Given the film's subject matter - a damaged young woman who undertakes a sadomasochistic relationship with her new boss, a repressed and obsessive lawyer - did she become a magnet for weirdos? 'Um, no,' she says, as if that possibility never entered her mind until now. 'The only weirdo I encountered was a TV interviewer here in London who said, "Hi, the last time I saw you, you were on pause on my VCR in a compromising position". I was like, "fuck you".'

Curled up on a huge sofa in a room in London's trendy Metropolitan Hotel, Gyllenhaal may be jet-lagged and press-lagged, but she has a natural feistiness that is undimmed by her obvious exhaustion. She is in town to promote Mona Lisa Smile, a big budget, old-fashioned Hollywood feel-good movie directed by Mike ' Four Weddings and a Funeral ' Newell, that opens here next month.

On screen, Gyllenhaal, who is 25, evinces a maturity and a lazy sensuality that belie her age; in the flesh, she is both younger and quirkier. Her voice possesses what one American critic memorably called 'a Kewpie Doll kookiness', which can be disorienting when she holds forth on subjects such as Hollywood's inability, or unwillingness, to tackle difficult or controversial subject matter. She seems blithely uninterested in fame, but utterly consumed by acting. 'I live in New York, and most of my friends are not in Hollywood. It's just too bizarre there. The hype and attention doesn't seem in direct correlation to the work I've done.'

Last year, Gyllenhaal took time out from films to appear on stage in Los Angeles in Homebody/Kabul, Tony Kushner's three-and-a-half-hour play about a British woman who travels to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in search of her missing mother. It was a difficult and not entirely sympathetic role, which attested to her willingness to constantly challenge herself. 'The LA audiences were tough', she says, wincing at the memory. 'It is a fucking awesome play but they are not used to having to work that hard, to invest in something that arduous but rewarding.' She describes it as 'the most difficult and the most fulfilling thing I have ever done'.

As her career choices to date illustrate, Gyllenhaal is a serious and single-minded actress, and it seems apt that her breakthrough came in a role that would have scared away many of her contemporaries. 'Secretary,' she says, 'was the first part I'd been offered with any real meat on it.' Until then, she had shone briefly in left-field films such as John Waters's flawed Cecil B. DeMented, Spike Jonze's cult hit Adaptation, and, opposite her younger brother, Jake, in Richard Kelly's ambitious and hallucinatory modern fairy tale Donnie Darko. She seems drawn to characters that, as she puts it, 'are broken in some way but aware of it'.

In Mona Lisa Smile, which stars Julia Roberts, Gyllenhaal plays another bad girl, Giselle Levy, a student attending the suffocatingly conservative all-female Wellesley College in the Fifties. It is easily the most mainstream film she has appeared in to date, and, though it is primarily a vehicle for Roberts as the progressive young lecturer who liberates the girls by her unconventional life and teaching methods, it is Gyllenhaal, alongside the even younger Kirsten Dunst, who steals the show.

While Dunst simmers and seethes as repressed bride-to-be, Betty Warren, whose world is utterly constructed in deference to her overbearing, and equally unhappy mother, Gyllenhaal has the altogether more complex task of portraying a bright, but wayward, teenager trying to cope with the breakdown of her relationship with a manipulative older man. Smarter and cooler than her fellow students, Giselle is easily the most interesting and believable character in the film. She is, though, another damaged character.

'I guess so, but she's not damaged like Lee Holloway in Secretary is. She's really smart, she's sexy, she's going to be OK in the long run. She makes mistakes, and falls for jerks and gets hurt, but she tries for life, and looks for life, and she doesn't allow herself to be just a victim.'

Gyllenhaal's onscreen presence - a mixture of wantonness and mischievous self-confidence - commands attention throughout. For all that, I tell her that I thought the film lacked edge, that it dealt with a potentially provocative issue in a very cosy Hollywood way. 'I think I was pretty edgy,' she counters, sounding a tad defensive 'and that's all I can take responsibility for.'

Leaving aside her character, did she like the finished film, though? She thinks about this for a moment, perhaps wondering whether to be totally honest or diplomatic. In the end, she opts for both options. 'Yeah. I watched it with my mother, who's a screenwriter and is very smart, and we were moved by it. It's a movie movie, though, and it's not challenging anything, which is hard for me.' Another pause while she mulls over how far to go with this implied criticism. 'I really think it's a time in my country, and in yours, where it's important to make movies that are transgressive and provocative in a way,' she says, leaning forward and looking deeply serious, 'and this one is not. Part of me thinks it's OK to make movies that aren't, but more and more I think it isn't.'

There is a subversive side to Gyllenhaal, then, and it's not just confined to the roles she chooses. She is that rare creature: a young Hollywood star with both a brain and a conscience. 'Giselle is a radical in a way,' she says at one point, returning to her character in Mona Lisa Smile, 'She's breaking out of a restrictive and regressive society which is very similar to the one I'm living in America right now. There is something political about that, about rebelling in whatever way you can against a reactionary and conservative moment in history.'

As she warms to her subject, she grows more animated, and you can glimpse the restless actress under the dreamy kook. 'I think the notion that here's a role and you have to fit yourself into it, that's bullshit. I could see the traps in that part and I resisted them all the way. She could easily have been a loose woman who says sorry in the end and cries, and is absolved, but I resisted that. I like the fact that she makes mistakes and tries for life, and looks for life. I like that she's nobody's victim.'

Gyllenhaal's precocious confidence, alongside her progressive idealism, may have been instilled during her upbringing amid the LA film community. Her father, Stephen Gyllenhaal, who is Swedish-American, is a film director of some note, best known for Paris Trout, a slice of southern gothic starring Dennis Hopper and Barbara Hershey. Her mother, Naomi Foner, is a screenwriter who often collaborates with her husband; together, they created A Dangerous Woman, a 1993 film which also featured Maggie and her younger brother, Jake, 24, currently the most famous family member. When I broach the subject of her family, she grows slightly prickly, perhaps understandably, given that it is the one subject she is forced to confront in every interview.

I ask her if she had a conventional childhood.'I don't know what that means, really,' she replies, 'a conventional childhood?' Were her parents bohemian, I persist, as every press cutting on her suggests? 'Somewhat,' she answers, somehow managing to look both bored and annoyed. I ride out the ensuing silence. 'I mean, you shouldn't fantasise it,' she says finally, sighing again at the inevitability of it all. 'We were bohemian, I guess, but we were also a pretty regular family. My friends were all really political so there was some interesting stuff around. On the whole, though, it was pretty uneventful and kind of normal.'

I remembering reading somewhere that Jake Gyllenhaal's first driving lesson was provided by Paul Newman, which may be 'kind of normal' by Hollywood standards but is pretty damn exotic round these parts. I let that one pass, though, and ask instead about her supposed rivalry with her slightly more famous brother. This brings forth another elongated sigh, another look ceiling-wards.

'Well, my newest answer to that question is that I'm really bored with being competitive. I'm so over it now.' Over talking about it, or over being it, I ask, undaunted? 'The latter,' she says, 'we're both doing well and doing really interesting things, and I'm kind of sick of it. We're a regular brother and sister, you know, we're supportive of each other, we're helpful. I don't feel competitive with him any more. I just want him to be happy, you know. I want him to get everything in the world he wants.'

Unlike Jake, who dropped out of Columbia University after two years, Maggie graduated from there with a BA in English. She studied briefly at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, which hardly seemed necessary given that she had already astonished audiences with her precociously gifted performances at the exclusive Harvard-Westlake High School, where she once played Ma Joad in an adaptation of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. That must have been quite a transformation, one I cannot quite picture however much I try. Back then, she was a student of the method school. 'She put weights on her ankles and on her wrists for weeks in rehearsal,' her drama teacher later recalled, 'to give her body the kind of sluggish maturity that she didn't have... That's how she works and it was very exciting.'

It is this kind of determination, coupled with an effortless natural ability, that sets Gyllenhaal apart from the current Hollywood brat pack. She is also, if you hadn't already guessed, unafraid to speak her mind, a trait that has brought her into conflict with more than one director. She spent a month discussing the script of Secretary with Steven Shainberg, before he convinced her that the role would become clearer as she actually inhabited it.

'There was something at the core of that film that was provocative in a way that interested me, and also feminist in a new way that interested me, but there were also places in it that really scared me. In almost every take, I had to take a risk. I had to really trust the director, but in some places, I had just said, "No, this is crossing the line. I don't believe this is telling the story we want to tell". He conceded too,' she adds, smiling. 'It was a real discussion, a real collaboration.'

Since that attention-grabbing breakthrough, alongside Mona Lisa Smile , Gyllenhaal has worked on Sidney Lumet's potentially controversial Strip Search , released later this year, in which she plays an American graduate student in China who is accused of being linked to a terrorist organisation. The film interweaves her story with that of a young Saudi Arabian student living in America who is arrested on the same charge at the same time. 'It is,' she says, 'another provocative film.'

This year, she will also appear in Casa de los babys, a film about six women who travel to South America to adopt children, and are then forced by law to live there for a time. It is directed by John Sayles, the last of American cinema's truly radical mavericks, who briefly crossed into the mainstream with 1996's acclaimed Lone Star.

'Working with John was an interesting experience,' she says, in a way that suggests she was not altogether taken with the experience. 'He does things differently. He gives you the freedom to work, then he takes it away and makes it into something that is on some level pre-determined. You have to accept that you are working on a John Sayles's movie insofar as he writes, directs and even edits it.' How, I wonder, did that impact on her own singular way of working? 'Well, it was a challenging process, and I learnt a hell of a lot, but most of the stuff that I felt was most interesting about my performance didn't make it onto the screen. It's like this idea in his head from the start and he does not allow anything to change it.'

As her publicist enters the room to signal that our allotted interview time is up, I ask her in conclusion if her own insistence on making challenging and - her favourite word - 'provocative' movies might ultimately lead to following in her father, or her mother's footsteps, and maybe writing and directing a script of her own.

'I've written some stuff already and I think I'm all right at it,' she grins cheekily, 'but then I read something like the Kushner script, and it's like "Oh my God, what am I doing?" Then again, when I see some of the stuff Hollywood sends out, it's like, "Oh fuck it, gimme a pen!"'

You have to love the girl, she has talent - and attitude - to burn, and, who knows, she may yet rewrite the Hollywood rule book. If not, it certainly won't be through lack of self-confidence.

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There's more about Maggie's political views/activities, and her brother's, at his website: www.jakegyllenhaal.com