Maggie Gyllenhaal
Maggie Gyllenhaal
Margalit Ruth "Maggie" Gyllenhaal is an American actress. She is the daughter of filmmakers Stephen Gyllenhaal and Naomi Achs and the older sister of actor Jake Gyllenhaal. She began her film career as a teenager with roles in her father's films and appeared alongside her brother in the psychological horror film Donnie Darko. She garnered critical praise for starring as Lee Holloway in Secretary, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. For her performance in Sherrybaby, she...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actress
Date of Birth16 November 1977
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
If you're going to play a hooker in a movie, the movie has to have the perspective, of course, that it isn't such a great thing. Probably the only way to really play a hooker well is to believe you're doing something that's good. But at the same time, the movie can't have that point of view.
I am looking for movies that are actually about something and that are questioning something. Movies that are provocative in some way and I am also looking for roles that I think will force me to grow or learn something about myself or the world in order to play them well.
I'm still trying to figure out what the right line is between myself and the people I play. Sometimes I go too far one way or too far the other.
I'm 37 and I was told recently I was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh.
A play is much easier to maintain your personal life with because if you're rehearsing, you're working like from 11 to 6 or 11 to 5 and you get to have your whole morning and your whole evening. When you're doing the play, you have all day.
I don't think there are that many parts I could say unequivocally "I would not play that," but there's lots of parts I read and I think, "I don't really want to do that. I don't really think that's how women act."
We were lounging around in this beautiful house in LA, and I'm coming from NY, so sometimes when we weren't working I would just sit on those folding chairs.
On a film, I was always acting. I was either changing my clothes really quickly and wiping off the lipstick and putting on the other lipstick and then working constantly, constantly.
I'm excited to be a part of this important project. Will and John are genuine heroes and I think their wives, Allison and Donna, are heroes, too. I feel privileged to be part of a project that will remember how we all came together on that day.
One of the things I think is really problematic about something like [government] spyware is that it isn't transparent - because of that anonymity and that secrecy, there aren't laws to regulate it.
We have our phones right by our beds, right next to us in our most exposed, vulnerable moments. And yet the government could have been collecting information from our phones at any moment. I think that basically as humans, we feel that's a violation.
Sometimes I'll read things in the script and think, "That's not how humans behave," or "I don't understand how to do that role and make it seem like I'm not some kind of strange alien or on a sitcom." I don't get it, and when I feel that way, I have to listen to my instinct. My initial instinct does lead me in a direction that I can trust.
I said to Ramona [my daughter] once ... you should never look yourself up on the Internet. It's something I've learned.
Being a mother has absolutely forced me. You have to write things down and have systems for all of it. And then you set up systems and you realize they don't work.