NYGossipGirl Exclusive: Maggie Gyllenhaal Interview

It wasn’t difficult for Maggie Gyllenhaal to play Jean Craddock in Crazy Heart. She herself had fallen for the “bad boy” before and could relate to being a mother – she has a daughter named Ramona.

NYGossipGirl recently caught up with the actress and talked about her new role and what it was like working with Jeff Bridges.

After having her daughter, Gyllenhaal took some time off, but when Ramona was around 18 months, she got a sudden urge to get back into acting. She took the role of Rachel in The Dark Knight and followed it with Sam Mendes’ Away We Go.

“I spent a year and a half, almost 2 years with all of my focus on my daughter and I just kind of went, ‘I need something for me,’ and it was this, it was this movie,” she said. “That’s exactly what Jean is going through. I think she spent a better part of her time completely focused on her child; trying to survive and she’s in an emergency state of where I was.”

In Crazy Heart, Jean falls for Bridges’ character, Bad Blake and although she knows the relationship won’t end well, she does it anyway, but Gyllenhaal can see why her character does what she does.

“Why does anyone like anyone? You know? The movie wouldn’t work if these two people didn’t love each other really deeply and they’re a very unlikely pairing, though I knew and I think Jeff knew that we had to make that true no matter what,” said Gyllenhaal. “And I think about the people that I’ve loved in my life, even my husband and it’s a little bit good for you and a little bit not good for you. When I’ve fallen in love in my life – and I met my husband really young, so maybe it changes things when you’re older – it happens immediately and I think that’s what happens to them. You just have that electricity immediately.”

Gyllenhaal met her husband, actor Peter Sarsgaard when she was 23 on the set of Steven Soderbergh’s 2003 low-budget and never-released drama In God’s Hands. Although their daughter is still very young, she doesn’t really know what her parents do.

“She came to set for lunch on this movie,” she said. “But it wasn’t really appropriate for her to be around, but for Nanny McPhee and The Big Bang, she was around a lot. It’s very confusing I think.”

Gyllenhaal remembers that she first met Bridges on the premiere of her film, Mona Lisa Smile and was excited to work with him on Crazy Heart.

“I met him at the premiere and I had a couple of glasses of champagne and I just went over to him and said, ‘I love your movies’ and he said, ‘We’re going to work together one day’ and it made my week of course, I was so thrilled,” she said. “But then I thought, we do work in a similar way and before we started shooting [for Crazy Heart], he called me a couple of times and I didn’t call him back, I just wasn’t ready yet to get into it. He didn’t care, but when I met him on the set, a couple of days before we started shooting, without saying anything about it, in 5 seconds I felt like we just said to each other immediately ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ And underneath that was ‘I’m up for anything, are you up for anything? Let’s do this’ and then it was just like that. We are really good friends.”

Posted: December 22nd, 2009 under Celebrity Interviews.
Tags: Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard

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