Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal: ​‘It’s a cau­tion­ary tale about the con­se­quences of starv­ing women’

It’s been a good 12 months for Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal. Her turn in David Simon and George Pele­canos’ small-screen ser­i­al, The Deuce, in which she plays Can­dy, a sex work­er turned porn direc­tor, has been laud­ed by crit­ics for its fem­i­nine per­spec­tive on the porn indus­try. At var­i­ous film fes­ti­vals, Gyl­len­haal also left her mark as the lead of Sara Colangelo’s The Kinder­garten Teacher, a remake of the 2014 Israeli film by Nadav Lapid. Like Can­dy, this role allows its pro­tag­o­nist, Lisa (Gyl­len­haal), to be imper­fect and frag­ile, yet stride through to get what she wants – despite her ques­tion­able decisions.

Gyl­len­haal tells LWLies that Lisa acts out due to her being restrained by our patri­ar­chal soci­ety and starved cre­ative­ly. ​“I can’t speak for all women but I do feel, liv­ing in Amer­i­ca now, that many women are wak­ing up to a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence, like we were sort of wish­ful-think­ing that we were in one place, when the real­i­ty is we’re some­where else,” she explains. ​“And I think there are so many ways in which I have twist­ed myself, bent over back­wards, in order to fit into some­thing that I thought I had to fit myself into.” She sees the film as, ​“almost a cau­tion­ary tale about the con­se­quences of starv­ing women.”

For Lisa Spinel­li, the con­se­quences are that she has become obsessed with Jim­my Roy (Park­er Sevak), a five-year-old boy in her class who seems to have a way with words. Gyl­len­haal choos­es to read their rela­tion­ship as one that is co-depen­dent. ​“Five-year-olds say incred­i­ble things all the time, and she is a poet, and nobody pays atten­tion to her work. I think she pulls out of this child some­thing that she needs.” She takes Jimmy’s qua­si-poet­ic ram­blings and turns them into art.

The film, thus, becomes about the artis­tic process itself – and its poten­tial for per­son­al expres­sion. Jimmy’s poems could be just words from a child, and ​“we’re so myopic, so sub­jec­tive and in her mind, who knows where these poems are com­ing from?” adds Gyl­len­haal. ​“Her need is so deep, and she’s been so under­mined, that they couldn’t pos­si­bly come from her: they have to come from some­where else.”

Even­tu­al­ly, Lisa does write her own poems – but they are not met with the same enthu­si­asm as Jimmy’s. ​“I don’t think she’s dis­sat­is­fied with the results of her poems. I think that’s a real­ly inter­est­ing ques­tion: who decides what’s good?” In the film, that’s Simon (Gael García Bernal), a sexy cre­ative writ­ing pro­fes­sor who has become smit­ten with Lisa’s work, but even more so by the idea of a beau­ti­ful woman hav­ing talent.

After the film’s Sun­dance pre­mière, Gyl­len­haal read reviews that called Lisa’s poet­ry mediocre, even though all the poems fea­tured in the film were penned by crit­i­cal­ly-acclaimed poets. In this assump­tion, Gyl­len­haal doesn’t sim­ply see misog­y­ny. ​“I think it’s a wish – the movie is way eas­i­er to watch if her poet­ry is mediocre. But if it’s com­pelling and worth­while, and nobody cares, it’s much more of a tragedy.”

Through­out her mis­ad­ven­ture, how­ev­er, Lisa’s mind is clear­ly ring on all cylin­ders: in order to keep mov­ing for­ward with her dark plans, she has to con­stant­ly remind her­self that Jim­my needs help. Gyl­len­haal remarks on how Can­dy in The Deuce shares Lisa’s abil­i­ty to think on her feet because, ​“she doesn’t have the lux­u­ry of being like, ​‘Oh, I didn’t get what I want­ed,’ pout­ing or being sad. She’s like, ​‘Okay, that didn’t work, no prob­lem: next thing.’ She’s con­stant­ly try­ing to fig­ure out how she can get what she needs. And Lisa is an extreme exam­ple, but there are aspects in all of us that are confused.”

The film’s cli­max sees Lisa no longer able to jus­ti­fy her actions. ​“You come to the end of that fever with her, and in that motel room you see her go, for one sec­ond, ​‘Oh my God, what did I do?’” She adds: ​“I love a movie where you get one moment of self-real­i­sa­tion and it takes the entire movie to get there.”

Lisa is just the lat­est entry on Gyllenhaal’s long list of inde­pen­dent­ly-mind­ed char­ac­ters. ​“If I think about it, Sec­re­tary was prob­a­bly the first time that I actu­al­ly found a role where I could artic­u­late some­thing in me that need­ed to come out.” For her, there are two types of worth­while part: ​“Some­times – rarely – a script holds inside it the pos­si­bil­i­ty of express­ing some­thing real­ly unusu­al, but also real and human, that maybe hasn’t been expressed before.”

This was the case with The Kinder­garten Teacher, which felt like, ​“the next step on a trip that [I’ve] been on.” But even a script that doesn’t per­fect­ly match with her views can have poten­tial. ​“Some­times I see there’s a pos­si­bil­i­ty of doing some­thing cool, there’s space for it, even though it isn’t total­ly what was intend­ed,” Gyl­len­haal explains, mak­ing a good argu­ment for actor auteurism. In the case of Can­dy, ​“that was a sit­u­a­tion where my hav­ing a dif­fer­ent point of view and entry point only helped our col­lab­o­ra­tion and shift­ed who she was.”

With these roles, Gyl­len­haal is chal­leng­ing the received wis­dom that female actors tend to be offered less inter­est­ing parts after they turn 30. ​“Just like with any­thing else,” she explains, ​“I have more expe­ri­ence now, I’m get­ting bet­ter at it. I know in a more stream­lined way how to do my work to ulti­mate­ly express what I want to express.” But this evo­lu­tion has also been per­son­al – Gyl­len­haal was recent­ly offered a role in a film oppo­site an actress she reveres, but had to turn it down.

“I got to a place where I was like, ​‘I’m wish­ing the script were good enough, and the script is not good enough.’” She doesn’t have any regrets, though. ​“Just hav­ing more expe­ri­ence, I think, does improve the work. It can, you know. It’s also about trust­ing my instincts about what appeals to me, even though some­times I still strug­gle with it.”