Maggie Gyllenhaal might prefer independent movies to Hollywood blockbusters, but as she tells Belinda McKeon, that doesn't stop the paparazzi from stalking her
Maggie Gyllenhaal smiles a smile of polite, determined detachment. I've just asked her how she is. And I'm not entirely sure she has actually answered me. Possibly, all she's offering is this look almost of amusement; why, it seems to say, would I bother to ask her such a thing? We're here to do business. We're here to talk about a film. We have 30 minutes. The clock's already ticking. The thing is, though, I really do want to know how Maggie Gyllenhaal is. I want to know how it is to be someone who is talked about, simultaneously, for her strong choices in film roles and for her most everyday, even her most inane activities.
Gyllenhaal, who turns 30 this year, only has to step out of her apartment and the event is reported practically live online; celebrity websites and magazines feature photographs, almost daily, of her sitting or standing alongside her fiance, the actor Peter Sarsgaard, or wheeling their eight-month-old daughter, Ramona, around in a pram.
When she was pregnant during a humid New York summer last year, pictures of her looking alternately bloated and radiant were everywhere; when she breast-fed her baby in a Manhattan restaurant earlier this summer, the grainy images sparked what gawker.com christened a "momtroversy"; with just as many readers condemning Gyllenhaal for her "exposure" as supporting her right to nurse her child. Few seemed to question the right of photographers to snatch such an image, or of media outlets to trumpet it; Gyllenhaal is one of the hottest pieces of real estate in paparazzi terms, her privacy as cheapened as that of the most attention-hungry pop princess.
People want to read about her outfits, her overheard cell phone conversations, and most of all, it seems, about her brunches with her younger brother, Jake, and their film-maker parents. Her appeal, it has to be said, extends at least in some part from her membership of the glamorous Gyllenhaal clan. Her exacting standards when it comes to parts may be famous, but they're not as famous as her brother, or now, as her baby. It sounds like being Maggie Gyllenhaal is an experience with more than a touch of the absurd.
And this much she will concede. Eventually. After we've dealt with the matter in hand, with the reason why she's sitting here in an anonymous hotel suite, facing journalist after journalist, facing questions about her relationship and her wedding plans and her daughter, while said daughter is being wheeled around in the vicinity by a close friend. Three years after shooting Laurie Collyer's Sherrybaby - the story of a young mother emerging from jail after a three-year sentence and a heroin addiction, with custody of her little girl as her goal - Gyllenhaal is still doing the publicity work for the film, churning out the character assessments, talking up her motivations, expanding, over and over, on all that she has learned and all that she remembers from that five-week shoot in a sweltering New Jersey suburb.
"To make a movie that's teeny-teeny-tiny," she says, "I'm signing on for years. To get it into festivals, to get it bought by distributors, to promote it; it's a totally different kind of commitment to a more mainstream role. So to choose a movie like that, I have to be really crazy about it. And believe that it's about something that is important."
Also - and understandably - she works from a less purely altruistic line of reasoning. "I don't want to make movies that nobody's going to see," she says. "The reason I'm making them is to affect people." And Sherrybaby is an affecting piece of work. Written and directed by Collyer, it doesn't flinch from the crude realities of the situation into which it thrusts its central character, moving between the grim environs of halfway houses, police stations, white-trash homes and cheap motel rooms. And, for 22-year-old Sherry Swanson, played with equal parts fire and compassion by Gyllenhaal, it moves from one instance of abuse, betrayal and disappointment to another.
It's a role which, in the hands of other actresses, would be delivered with a blatantly broken air and an abundance of sad-eyed stares off into the middle distance, but from her breakthrough role as an S&M-friendly office worker in Steven Shainberg's Secretary, Gyllenhaal has been remarkable for rendering roles memorable and true by lacing them with the unexpected, with the constantly shifting and deepening nuance; her turns, recently, in the more mainstream films Mona Lisa Smile, Stranger Than Fiction and Trust The Man made interesting work of what were some potentially low-yield characters.
Gyllenhaal sees it as a matter of empathy; an approach, she explains, which carried her through some of the more challenging scenes in Sherrybaby. In other words, through the utterly depressing sex scenes in which Sherry gets naked in motel rooms and basements for a trail of extremely dubious men. These scenes were difficult to watch afterwards, says Gyllenhaal, but they weren't difficult to shoot.
"Because you know, I don't believe that an actor can play someone who they think is not as smart as they are, or not as emotionally capable. You have to use all your tools. And if I were Sherry, with all the tools I have, with my brain, and my heart, and my body, how could I really do everything I could possibly do to survive? Sherry is in such dire straits, she's in such a hard place, I don't think she has the luxury of allowing herself to feel victimised or pained or angry, cause if she does she'll fall apart completely. And the only real tool she has is this kind of fierce naive hopefulness. So I guess I knew that I had to look for what was hopeful and pleasurable and good in every situation."
Including even the seediest scenes of exploitation, the saddest scenes of just giving up. "You know, you could have played any number of those scenes with a quivering lip, but I just was looking for how they were hot, or how they felt good, or how they were ethically good, everything, all the time."
Note the language; the brain as well as the heart, the intellect as well as the instinct, the ethical substance of scenes as well as the forceful display. Gyllenhaal's choices, and her methods - arguing with directors, discussing every line carefully, spending time, for the role of Sherry, in halfway houses around New Jersey and Brooklyn - have won her a reputation as intellectual, as anti-superficial, even - because, in the shorthand of PR and celebrity press, these things are synonymous - as staunchly political, as an active and an articulate Democrat.
But when I put this to her she looks momentarily blank; she's a Democrat, yes, and she has "a lot of hope" for the 2008 election, saying she's "excited", that she's gathering information and paying attention. "I don't know who I'm going to support yet," she says, "but I'm looking for somebody who is both able to come at things in a new way and also feels like they have the strength to combat what I think is a really complicated and dark world right now." She's "continually astonished," she says, by the Bush administration.
Interesting noises, but Gyllenhaal doesn't elaborate, except to say that it's nigh impossible to have "any sort of dissenting view about anything in this country right now". Here, of course, may lie the reason for the strangely abstract nature of her purportedly outspoken political sense; she is still smarting somewhat from the fallout of her comment, made during promotional work for The Great New Wonderful (the first of two 9/11 films she made between 2005 and 2006, the second being Oliver Stone's World Trade Center), that America was "responsible in some way" for the September 11th attacks. Gyllenhaal immediately rushed to explain the comment - not to qualify it, she emphasises, but to explain it - calling 9/11 "an occasion to be brave enough to ask some serious questions about America's role in the world", but the media reaction was still massive and largely negative, with anger unleashed on the then-27-year-old at every turn.
Now, she describes the experience as a frightening and confusing one, but one from which she has learned a huge deal. One of the most startling aspects of the whole brouhaha, she says, was the manner in which her words were twisted by many journalists after the event - not to cast her in a negative light, but to portray her as the remorseful little girl who had learned her lesson.
It was a turn of events perhaps more driven by her own publicity people than Gyllenhaal realises, but journalists were suddenly keen to rebuild the image of the actress as a likeable, fresh-faced talent: and one who knew her place. She was unimpressed. "I read every interview that I gave about it, and I felt like the journalists were trying to protect me or something," she says. "Because they would say, she's so sorry, and regrets what she said. And I thought, there is a way in which I'm sorry. There is no way in which I regret it. What are you writing that for?"
She laughs, looking baffled. "Why were they doing it?" One thing is for certain - some sections of the press seem a lot less interested in protecting her these days. She feels "very complicated" about the celebrity which is now her seemingly inescapable lot, she says, and knows that by taking over Katie Holmes's role in The Dark Knight, the new Batman film, she may have made things worse for herself.
"I feel like I do want the power that comes with celebrity on some level," she says, "because I do feel that I have good intentions, that I want to make movies that a lot of people see that are about things I think are important. And I want to have artistic choices open to me. And I feel like I could do something good with that power. At the same time, I almost didn't want to do Batman, because I don't want my family in that kind of press." She rolls her eyes. "I mean, when I was in labour going to the hospital, there were 30 photographers outside my house; the car company we were using called and told them that we were going to the hospital. And when my daughter was five days old they were ringing our doorbell - they called the fire department to try and get us outside so that they could photograph our daughter and . . . " A heavy sigh. "It's just so out of control. I find it really disgusting."
She gets a "mama lion thing" when she's with Ramona, she says, and is determined to keep the baby's face out of the public domain. That many people had a problem with her decision to breast-feed her baby in public genuinely astounds her - "I mean, what else am I supposed to do, stay home all day? What if my daughter is hungry?" - but not as much as the fact that such photographs, and photographs still more invasive, can be printed in the first place.
"I mean, if someone has a problem with [ nursing in public], that's really nothing to do with me. But I'm angry that someone felt that they wanted to, you know, make money off a picture of that, of my daughter. I don't know why that's allowed without my permission. I just don't understand." She laughs a high, weary laugh of someone who lives, every day, with the absurd.
SherryBaby opens in Ireland on Friday, July 27th