Maggie Gyllenhaal may be ritually abused by the boss for whom she takes dictation in Secretary, but the actress from a movie industry family is nobody's fool, writes Donald Clarke.
What a strange business it is being a movie star. Here I am meeting Maggie Gyllenhaal for the first time; we're politely shaking hands like the business associates we sort of are; we're exchanging pleasantries about how we made our way to the Dorchester Hotel. Yet, I spent two hours of the previous day watching her repeatedly bend over a desk to be savagely spanked by James Spader in her provocative, worrying new film, Secretary. Why are we still on such formal terms, for goodness sake?
The 25-year-old actress has been promoting Steven Shainberg's film since it opened in America last autumn and must now be used to such bemused responses from shell-shocked viewers. Indeed, considering the way her character allows herself to be ritually abused by the boss for whom she takes dictation, Gyllenhaal must have had to suffer tongue-lashings from unforgiving feminists and right-wing moralists alike.
"Actually, I was a bit disappointed by the response," she says. "I expected an old-school feminist response, and I was looking forward to it because I felt I had a really good argument against it." Well, let's hear it then. In the film, a damaged young woman, recently released from a mental institution, takes a job with a cold, distant lawyer who begins punishing her for minor errors in ways that surely would not satisfy normal workplace guidelines. She comes to enjoy it, but there remains a huge moral difficulty in that initially he orders her to submit to him. The liaison does not begin with consent.
"That's a very specific point," Gyllenhaal says. "At first my character knows nothing about sex. There was no way she was going to be able to ask for what she wanted, or know she would be turned on by this. It is certainly complicated politically."
As you may have gathered, Gyllenhaal is nobody's fool. A graduate in literature from Columbia University, she was, until recently, best known as the big sister of fellow actor Jake Gyllenhaal. That changed when her rooted, emotionally measured performance in Secretary gained her a Golden Globe nomination. Sibling rivalry being what it is, I wonder if there is still jealousy between Maggie and Jake, who has excelled in recent films such as Donnie Darko and Moonlight Mile.
"It existed a bit more when Jake was doing all this work and I wasn't," she gamely admits. "I was at college, taking it very seriously, and I did feel jealousy and that was hard. Then, this year, all this stuff began happening. I actually got nominated for the Golden Globe on Jake's birthday. It was weird; all these people were phoning him up and saying [adopts doleful, consoling voice]: 'Hey, Happy Birthday'. It's like the culture was encouraging us to feel jealousy.
"But we realised that if we learned to support one another and acknowledged that it was taking nothing from the other if one was successful, then we could become a really powerful team."
With their wide eyes and dark Mediterranean colouring, they are unmistakably brother and sister, two roles they played in Donnie Darko. But Maggie has a more old-fashioned sort of beauty, looking as if she could have stepped out of a sepia photograph. You can't help but feel that they must have been destined for movie stardom from the start, not least because their parents are in the business; father, Steven Gyllenhaal, is a director and mother, Naomi Foner, is a screenwriter.
"Oh yeah, I was always acting," she says. "But my parents never wanted me to do it until I'd finished school. But part of the reason I was so enthusiastic was that it was always around me. My parents were working with really interesting actors - Halle Berry, Barbara Hershey, Debra Winger - and I got to see them work. So I got to see the best of the profession in action."
The two siblings exercised their early thespian instincts by lip-synching to Madonna tracks together, before Maggie made her first screen appearance in her father's 1992 adaptation of Graham Swift's novel Waterland. She continued to pop up in movies throughout her teens and early 20s, securing a sizeable role in John Waters's 2000 Hollywood satire Cecil B Demented and smaller parts in Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
This year, with four further films due for release, she is in danger of becoming an industry. But nobody who takes a break to go to a real university can be entirely in love with Hollywood. Does the desire to be a pampered movie star motivate her in any way?
"I think Jake has a streak in him that is interested in the commercial cinema in a way that I don't," she says. (Indeed, the younger member of the clan is currently shooting the latest disaster movie from Godzilla's Roland Emmerich). "I don't want to be a huge movie star. I just made a movie with Julia Roberts, and I saw how much she has to protect herself. It is such an effort for her, and it becomes so difficult to penetrate that protective layer that she needs to have just to walk down the street. Now, when you're an actress, you have to open yourself up, so that can become a problem."
The release of Mike Newell's Mona Lisa Smile, which sees that collaboration between Gyllenhaal and Roberts, will coincide with that of independent maestro John Sayles's new picture Casa de Los Babys, in which Gyllenhaal also features, and she admits that her off-beat sensibilities fit more comfortably into Sayles's universe.
But it is Secretary that really announces her to the world. How did it feel to be asked to carry a film for the first time? "I don't see it that way," she says. "I'm just playing a girl and she happens to have a lot to do. In some ways it's easier when you have a lot to do, because you can feel entitled to ask for what you need. I'm not just here for a day or two; I have a relationship with people. If somebody says you have to walk to that desk, I can say: 'No, I can't, because it doesn't make sense'." Oh, this is interesting. So, she's having J-Lo tantrums already? She smiles, but doesn't laugh (she doesn't laugh often).
"I think it's important to have an opinion. As a young actress, you have to fight to get your opinion heard. Unless you fight for it, nobody is going to ask you for it."
I suspect there is a pretty tough, knotty side to Gyllenhaal. She may look like an Edwardian bush baby; and she does own up that when she returned to New York after this year's Independent Spirits awards, the stress drove her to break down in tears at a dinner party. But just listen to how she forced director Steven Shainberg to rigorously analyse Erin Cressida Wilson's script for Secretary.
"I knew that we were dealing with things that were so on-the-line that if we got it even a bit wrong, we could end up with a reactionary, anti-feminist movie. We spent a long time not acting, not rehearsing, just going through every single detail to make sure it did not cross over that very definitive line."
And what about the film poster, which features a shapely pair of stocking-clad legs, a mini-skirted bottom and the slogan "Assume the Position". Isn't this a rather lurid way of marketing a thoughtful, grown-up picture? Are they even her legs?
"No, they're not my legs," she says. "This is what I think of the poster. At first I hated it. I thought it was anathema to everything the movie's about. But now I think that it's ironic. If you see the movie and then look at the poster you are bound to get the irony."
Given what I've seen her get up to, I feel able to ask her something that's been bugging me. So, how much does it hurt to be paddled over-and-over by James Spader? "Well, everyone was really careful about protecting me," she says. "There are some scenes though where I couldn't be protected, because you can really see him spank me. So, I said let's go for it. Well, we discovered that I couldn't do it all day, because he was really hitting me. Besides, people who do actually spank each other don't do it all day, do they?"
What a strange business this really is.
Secretary opened at selected cinemas yesterday