Brave New Girl

She inspired (yes, inspired) as a masochistic typist in Secretary; now she challenges sexual mores at '50s Wellesley in Mona Lisa Smile. Count on Maggie Gyllenhaal to stir things up.

By Brooke Hauser

Maggie Gyllenhaal is the girl you fell in love with in college. Smart, adorable, a touch subversive, she uses words like “a priori,” “reactionary,” and then . . . “hugest.” She talks a lot. Sometimes to the point of her own distraction. For instance, over lunch at Hollywood’s Les Deux Café, in the midst of explaining why it was so important that porn mogul Larry Flynt tested the flexibility of the First Amendment, she spots something bright out of the corner of her eye. “Oh, look!” she says, suddenly noticing our plate of crudités. “A little yellow carrot! A pink one, too!”

In person, as onscreen, Maggie Gyllenhaal humanizes everything she touches. At 25, she’s the rare ingenue who seems not poised (she’s too opinionated), not polished (notice the unshaven armpits), but genuinely at ease. That’s thanks in part to her pedigree: The daughter of director Stephen Gyllenhaal and screenwriter Naomi Foner, she, along with her equally talented sibling Jake (Moonlight Mile), grew up in Hollywood. But it’s mostly because her career is taking care of itself. In addition to starring in Tony Kushner’s new play Homebody/Kabul, Gyllenhaal appeared in John Sayles’s Casa de los Babys this fall as one of six women who travel to South America to adopt. Next, she’ll share the screen with Julia Roberts in the 1950s drama Mona Lisa Smile, in which she plays a rebellious Wellesley undergrad who uses sex to uproot the college’s tight-laced traditions. “I can definitely relate to that—just wanting to shake things up when they feel solid and immovable,” she says, adding that she really wanted to play “someone who was hungry to live, as opposed to a symbol: you know, the wounded woman.”

Fearless, forthright, and an Ivy League graduate to boot (she was an English major at Columbia University), Gyllenhaal is anything but a victim. As the masochistic typist who blossoms under the tough love of her boss (James Spader) in last year’s Secretary, she proved that a woman can be both submissive and strong—and to hell with political correctness. In addition to nabbing a Golden Globe nomination for the role, she clearly struck a chord with female viewers—and not just the S&M crowd. She recalls, “The other day I was having dinner with some friends, and this really conservative-looking woman came up to me and said, ‘Oh, I loved your movie. It was so inspiring!’ And my friend said, ‘Inspiring how? What exactly did it inspire you to do?’ ”

In a movie that requires its star to endure multiple spankings and a nude scene, a lesser actress might have seemed exploited. But Gyllenhaal’s self-confidence is a hard thing to shake. Says Secretary director Steven Shainberg, “She’s willing to bear an unknown situation that might cause her pain, physical or emotional, but which she stays in, because she wants to know what it is [that she’s experiencing].”

Case in point: Three weeks after our lunch, Gyllenhaal is back in New York (where she’s been living since she was 17) filming what she says is the most intense project she’s ever worked on. Strip Search is an HBO movie directed by Sidney Lumet, about an American graduate student in China who’s accused of being tenuously involved with terrorists. “Yesterday, I was naked in a Chinese jail cell, where it’s supposed to be 110 degrees, I’m being interrogated, and it’s terrifying.” So why do it? “I think it’s important to see,” she says. “It’s a real violation, and it forces people to get emotionally involved in something that’s intellectual and political.”

Gyllenhaal’s penchant for provocation is topped only by her emotional availability. As the youngest lead American actress in Casa de los Babys (also starring Marcia Gay Harden, Lili Taylor, and Daryl Hannah), she says, “I felt out of place and not listened to. I would call my boyfriend [actor Peter Sarsgaard] and say, ‘I’m so unhappy. This is so hard.’ And he had the objectivity to say, ‘Maggie, you sound just like the girl you’re playing in the movie.’ ” The intensity of the film’s subject matter—adoption, the inability to conceive—took its toll on the cast, who shared a house in Acapulco during the one-month shoot. At one point, Gyllenhaal says, “almost all of us thought we were pregnant.”

Such total surrender is typical of the actress, who’s now considering a script about the Black Dahlia, the Hollywood murder victim who was born with underdeveloped genitals. “If I’m going to spend three months of my life thinking about a movie, I want it to force me to explore something in a way I haven’t before,” Gyllenhaal says. In this case: “What does it mean to have a piece of you not fully formed? What does it mean to have your vagina not fully formed? Are you still completely a woman? And what does that mean?”

We can’t wait to find out.