Gyllenhaal opens up on her role in Roland Emmerich’s White House Down and tells us how she managed work with her new-born
Maggie Gyllenhaal had just had a baby when director Roland Emmerich came calling with a prominent role in his latest action-thriller White House Down. “Initially, when Roland asked me to do the movie, I was, ‘No way am I going to do this! I have a tiny baby,’” explains the 35-year-old actress, who rose to prominence on the back of her 2002 turn in the indie hit Secretary.
“I wasn’t thinking of working at all, let alone on a huge movie that would take such a long time but Roland just completely charmed me and he convinced me.” The secret to Emmerich’s success was the strength of the role on offer. He wanted Gyllenhaal to play special agent Carol Finnerty, a vital cog in the machinery that drives White House Down’s high-paced narrative. “Even though it is a big, wild movie, I think Roland wanted her to be real and he never wanted her to be the girl who is tied to the railway tracks, the damsel in distress. In fact, on some level I think the part and the character are unusually complex and interesting for a summer action movie,” says Gyllenhaal.
Audience meet Gyllenhaal’s character when one of the film’s two leading men apply for a job at the White House. Channing Tatum plays John Cale, who’s pitching for his dream position of protecting the president of the United States, James Sawyer (played by the second leading man, Jamie Foxx). “In the beginning you see that I am divorced and I am not happy. I put everything into my work and then, pretty early on, I bump into Channing’s character in a hallway and it turns out we are ex-lovers and it electrifying. I am in this position of power in the Secret Service and Channing’s looking for a job and I interview him and realise that he is not qualified.”
Events take a turn for the worse, however, when Tatum’s character takes his little girl on a tour of the White House just as a heavily armed paramilitary group storms the building. Now, with the nation’s government falling into chaos and time running out, it’s up to Cale to save his daughter, the president and the country. “As the movie goes on there are examples of her witnessing that he is doing all these things to protect the president. So she has to rethink what it means to be a hero, to be great at your job, to be a super Secret Service agent and she starts to realise that it also has to do with taking risks.
Indeed, Gyllenhaal says that she shared the set with two charming co-stars. Tatum and Foxx were keen to make her feel at home. “I was the only girl on set. They made me laugh and that was really nice — especially after having a baby where you have just been laying around in your pyjamas! I remember Roland at one point had to come into a helicopter that we were shooting in and tell Jamie to stop making me laugh. He was doing an Obama imitation and making me laugh so much,” Gyllenhaal reminisces.
She had already met Foxx when the actor worked alongside her brother Jake on the film Jarhead. While the male cast had to contend with explosions and stunts and the use of high-tech weaponry, Gyllenhaal had a different set of challenges with which to contend. “I didn’t get to do too much of the actual ‘running through burning buildings’ kind of action,” she says.