Woman Crush Wednesday: Maggie Gyllenhaal is a Powerhouse in ‘The Deuce’

Happy first Wednesday of fall! While we know you’ll miss Summer Fridays, beach days, and sweating in your office when the AC breaks, you can rest easy knowing one thing isn’t going anywhere: Woman Crush Wednesdays. So bring on the season of pumpkin spice lattes; we’ll still be celebrating our favorite, bad ass women in the entertainment industry. This week, our crush is just that: a powerhouse actress that’s worked all across Hollywood, and doesn’t shy away from difficult projects. Ladies and Gentleman, Maggie Gyllenhaal.

WHO’S THAT GAL: Maggie Gyllenhaal

WHY WE’RE CRUSHING: Gyllenhaal stars in HBO’s critically acclaimed series The Deuce, which returns September 9 for its third and final season. Beginning in 2017, we watched Gyllenhaal play Eileen “Candy” Merrell, a sex worker in New York City during the 1970s who leaves the dangers of the street to work as an actor and director in the emerging porn industry. The series also stars James Franco as twin brothers Vincent and Frankie Martino, who are both fronts for the mafia. While the first two seasons of the show dealt with the beginnings of this business, season three will skip to the mid-1980s where video, specifically the VHS tape, is transforming the porn industry into a legitimate, commercially-successful enterprise.

As you can imagine, Gyllenhaal’s Candy was complex to begin with. But even throughout the course of this series, her character has gone through significant changes, from starting out in the middle of seedy Times Square to forming her own space as a filmmaker and key player in a booming new industry. Over the past two seasons, Gyllenhaal’s performance in The Deuce has been nothing short of groundbreaking. The way she portrays both Candy’s rise as a pioneering businesswoman as well as the many obstacles she comes up against, such as the continued abuses and sexual harassment she endures, makes us believe that this role is, without a doubt, one of Gyllenhaal’s most career-defining moments. And that’s saying a lot given that Gyllenhaal has always portrayed complex, female characters. But don’t just take it from us. In her own words, the actress has said that she’s continually sought out characters that have “some aspects that are powerful, and some that are confused, broken and vulnerable.” Gyllenhaal’s mission has been to show us real women, not fantasies.

Apart from her acting career, Gyllenhaal has championed numerous causes, among them the Times Up Movement. Gyllenhaal has always voiced her opinions about the disadvantages of women in the entertainment industry, from the gender pay gap to the issue of sexual harassment, claiming that we, unfortunately, live in a “misogynistic world.” Still, she has worked tirelessly to rectify these issues. In fact, acting as co-executive producer, Gyllenhaal helped The Deuce become the first HBO show that requires an “intimacy coordinator” on-site to make sure that all parties are comfortable with the series’ many sex scenes. In addition to her advocacy work for gender equality, the actress is also outspoken about human rights abuses both in and outside of the United States. She has worked particularly close with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and was vehemently in opposition to the Iraq War in the early 2000s. All in all, Gyllenhaal is a woman to admire for many reasons, even beyond the ones we’ve detailed above.

WHERE YOU’VE SEEN HER BEFORE: Gyllenhaal has been around for quite a while. In fact, her career began when she was just a teenager and she acted in small roles in her father’s, Stephen Gyllenhaal, films, including A Dangerous Woman in 1993 and Homegrown in 1998. Her breakout moment came in 2002 when she co-starred in the dramedy Secretary, alongside James Spader. In this film, Gyllenhaal played Lee Holloway, a young woman recently released from a psychiatric hospital who gets a job as a secretary, but finds that this employee-employer relationship quickly turns sexual and sadomasochistic. Following this role, for which the actress received much critical acclaim, Gyllenhaal starred in numerous other high-grossing films, including Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, with Drew Barrymore and George Clooney, Mona Lisa Smile, where she co-starred with Julia Roberts, and Sherrybaby, where Gyllenhaal played a drug-addict determined to stay clean for her daughter.

Her next big role of that decade (maybe you could call it breakout 2.0) came in 2008 when she starred in The Dark Knight as Rachel, a young Assistant District Attorney torn between her love for Bruce Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale) and Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). The Dark Knight was Gyllenhaal’s most commercially successful movie by far, grossing roughly $1 billion globally. Since then, you may have seen Gyllenhaal in other productions, such the 2009 musical Crazy Heart, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, the family-friendly and financially successful Nanny McPhee Returns, and even the BBC mini-series and spy thriller The Honourable Woman. Following this latter role, the actress received a much-deserved Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. Most recently, Gyllenhaal starred in the critically-acclaimed drama The Kindergarten Teacher as a teacher who obsessively believes one of her students is a child prodigy.

WHERE YOU’LL SEE HER AGAIN: Already, Gyllenhaal is slated to star in numerous films according to IMBd, including The Homecoming: A Musical, with her husband Peter Sarsgaard, as well as The Farnsworth House, a romance about the relationship between famous architect Mies Van der Rohe (Ralph Fiennes) and his client Dr. Edith Farnsworth (Gyllenhaal). Though we’re saying deuces to The Deuce, Gyllenhaal’s career is clearly far from over. She’s even set to make her directorial debut with The Lost Daughter, an adaptation of the 2006 novel of the same name. And while we wish her the best of luck in this next endeavor, we doubt she’ll need it.

Stream The Deuce on HBO Go and HBO Now