But Gyllenhaal was committed to making the character her own from the very first time she read the script -- at her brother Jake's house with a man standing guard in the driveway to make sure that she wouldn't run off with the franchise's secrets. "When [director and co-writer] Chris Nolan gave me the script, he said, 'She's not quite finished yet,' " Gyllenhaal says of the character. "So I read it, and I had a lot of ideas about ways that I thought that she could be stronger. And he was very open and collaborative and interested. In that first preliminary conversation, a lot of things that we talked about ended up in the movie. It was really trying to find a way that I was absolutely in love with Harvey Dent and absolutely in love with Bruce Wayne, the ways I found them both honorable, ethical, moral men and the ways that I had problems with their ethics and morals."
Theperformance
Maggie Gyllenhaal: The mother and actress steps into her biggest feature yet as Rachel Dawes in 'The Dark Knight.' It was a role she couldn't turn down, but she was intent on making the character stronger.
Gyllenhaal has earned two Golden Globe nominations -- for roles as the masochistic new hire in "Secretary" and the heroin-addicted mother in "Sherrybaby" -- and appeared in bigger budget fare like "Stranger Than Fiction" and "World Trade Center."
"When I started acting [in 2000], you could make an independent movie for $5 million and pretty easily get it financed with one sort-of-known actor in it," she recalls. "That is not true anymore unless you're making broad comedy or thriller or horror films. I've been thinking about how to get the things that are interesting to me made. So at the moment, I'm getting interested in what I guess you would call producing."
Rather than struggling to strike balance in her life as a new mother and an actress, she's integrating the two. She recently wrapped another high-profile project, director Sam Mendes' "Farlanders," a comedy about a couple in search of the perfect place to raise a baby. "I got to set my first day and I thought, 'I haven't worked in a long time. I've just been with my daughter,' " Gyllenhaal says. "And in the scene, I was acting with a 4-year-old and an 11-month-old. So there were two 11-month-old twins, and they were hysterical the entire day. And so I ended up mommying. You know, the calming, the baby bouncing, giving the baby its pacifier."
She smiles, calm and a little sleep-deprived. "If I weren't a mom, I never would have been able to do it."
