The “horrible” performance Maggie Gyllenhaal worked through: ” I don’t think I could play that part now”
Just as being a successful footballer doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to manage a Premier League team one day, making a mark on Hollywood as an actor doesn’t give you a free pass to becoming a leading director.
Some, like Robert Redford or Greta Gerwig, have done it where others failed. And Maggie Gyllenhaal looks like she could follow in those legends’ footsteps.
As an actor she had nigh-on 20 years of taking on parts that would have most agents saying things down the phone like ‘absolutely not, what the hell are you thinking’ in movies including the notorious Secretary, for which she picked up a Golden Globe nomination, and 2004’s Strip Search, in which she played an American student locked up in China on charges of terrorism.
That’s not to mention her decision to take the lead in Hysteria, a film about the invention of the vibrator, and to front the HBO porn drama The Deuce, which she also produced as well as starred in, again collecting a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress thanks to her performance as sex worker ‘Candy’.
Gyllenhaal showed she could neatly move between big-budget mainstream movies like Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center and then go and do a lower-budget project like the 2006 drama Sherrybaby, a film about a young woman recovering from heroin addiction who tries to rebuild her life after release from prison.
The actor had to balance the rigours of her real life with the harrowing tale played out by her character in the movie, telling Interview: “When you’re the lead in a movie, when you’re in every moment of the movie, it’s hard not to live it. We shot Sherrybaby in 25 days. I was never in my own clothes. I would get into her clothes, be her all day, come home, fall asleep, wake up, go back to work”.
Adding, “What I found with Sherry was that she was in such a rough place that she didn’t have the luxury to feel any kind of self-pity or to fall apart at all, or she would not have been able to survive.
The film pulled no punches in portraying the life of Sherry Swanson, as the woman who is barely out of her teens has to fight to see her daughter, stay clear of fellow drug addicts attempting to pull her back into addiction, and make herself look as respectable as possible in order to secure a job and a source of income. At the time, Gyllenhaal was able to separate herself from Swanson, but things would haunt her to some degree in the months afterwards.
Gyllenhaal added, “So I shot all these fucked-up scenes that were really horrible, but I didn’t experience them that way. Obviously, I understood that all the things that happened in the movie were painful for her, but I didn’t really let that into the work. Then all the terrible things I’ve had to go through surfaced after we’d finished filming. And I got over it. I don’t think I could play that part now. I don’t know that I could be okay with the things I had to be okay with in order to play her.”
Now, Gyllenhaal has turned her sights to working behind the camera; she began with her first film as a director, The Lost Daughter, in 2021, starring Olivia Colman, which was nominated for three Oscars, including ‘Best Actress’ for Colman and ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’. Next up will be The Bride! – the stylish update on The Bride of Frankenstein set in 1930s Chicago and starring Christian Bale and Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley. The film will hit cinemas in the UK on March 6th.
