The humiliating audition that changed everything for Maggie Gyllenhaal: “OK, fuck this!”
While male actors regularly transition into directing later in their careers, women actors are rarely afforded the same luxury, struggling to break into the gatekept boys’ club built around being behind the camera, except for a recent exception in the form of Maggie Gyllenhaal.
The actor turned filmmaker for 2021 The Lost Daughter, which picked up three Oscar nominations and landed her a nod at the Golden Globes, and is now ready with her sophomore effort, The Bride!, slated for a 2026 release. However, the journey to figuring out camera angles has not been a smooth one, despite being born into a showbiz family.
Even though 2002’s dark dom-sub comedy Secretary helped establish her as a leading lady, its complex legacy is still a talking point to this very day, and like most women, the star had to overcome a lot, from facing gendered discrimination to hyper-sexualisation, running the gamut of her career.
During a roundtable discussion orchestrated by The Hollywood Reporter, Gyllenhaal and a number of her contemporaries discussed the various pitfalls of being a woman in Hollywood, wherein she cast her mind back to her very early days in the business and one particular incident that left her in disbelief.
“When I was really young, I auditioned for this really bad movie with vampires,” she recalled, “I wore a dress to the audition that I thought was really hot. Then I was told I wasn’t hot enough. My manager at the time said, ‘Would you go back and sex it up a little bit?’ So I put on leather pants, a pink leopard skinny camisole and did the audition again and still didn’t get the part. After that, I was like, ‘OK, fuck this!’”
While Gyllenhaal doesn’t name the production, it was presumably filmed at some point in the mid-to-late 1990s, as while she had started her career earlier in the decade with appearances in some of her father Stephen’s films, she really stepped out on her own around the turn of the millennium.
A quick Google search of ‘bad ’90s vampire movies’ reveals any number of shoddy flicks this could have been, such as Dracula 2000, which starred Gerard Butler as the eponymous Count, or From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money, the utterly abysmal sequel to Robert Rodriguez’s enduring cult classic.
Apparently, this sort of response was all too common for Gyllenhaal towards the initial stages of her career as she remembered constantly being turned down on the grounds of her looks, routinely being told she wasn’t pretty or sexy enough to play certain parts. Personally, I think it’s clear that Gyllenhaal is an objectively good-looking person, but that isn’t the point, for these responses are indicative of the objectifying attitudes towards women (especially young ones) in the film industry.
As a director, Gyllenhaal has taken it upon herself to tell female-centric stories that don’t revolve around sex, wherein The Lost Daughter focuses on a middle-aged woman forced to confront her past, while The Bride! lends a voice to the oft-overlooked spouse of Frankenstein’s monster. These actions have clearly been informed by her early experiences in Hollywood, so it’s nice to know some good has come from that truly awful time.
