Interview With Maggie Gyllenhaal at gURL.com

You play many flawed characters. Has playing these characters been helpful or insightful to learn things you might not have learned about your life?

I think everybody I've played has affected my life and taught me things...I've loved almost every woman I've played. There's a couple where I just think, "Oh, that experience was really hard," and I don't want to be that person again, but I love them all. And it would be sort of funny to see them all be in a room together.

In general, I think I come away learning a lot. I spend so much of my life doing this; it would be a waste not to get anything from it.

So tell us, what you were like in high school?

In junior high, I was not happy. I went to an all-girls school for two years and then it changed into a co-ed school. When it was all girls, I was miserable. It was that sort of Mean Girls thing and it was just so hard. By the time I got into 9th grade, I sort of felt like, 'Oh, whatever with all of you.' And boys came and everything kind of calmed down.

Once I got to 9th or 10th grade, I found a group of people who were doing things a little differently and who were much more embracing--that really helped. I did theater in high school and that was fun.

I actually went away for a semester in high school. I went to a farm in Vermont and I went to school on this farm. That was pretty amazing.

How were you different coming back from Vermont? It sounds like an interesting experience.

It was! It was actually pretty amazing. It was this school called The Mountain School, which is still around. I went to a great high school, a very academic school--which is not for everybody but was good for me--I'm into that stuff. But there's a certain way they teach you to think in high school. [For example] when you write a paper, you have to have a thesis and then a claim and then a warrant.

The Vermont school was about a broader way of thinking. Like if you read an article about the environmental situation somewhere, we would then see that, okay, 'Who funded this article?' And 'Oh, this was funded by Exxon Corporation.' So, where is your information coming from, and how do you analyze it knowing where it's coming from?

That's not usually the way they teach thinking in high school.

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