Maggie, Maybe...

Image credit: World Trade Center: Francois Duhamel

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Maggie Gyllenhaal

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''Maggie is this tremendously intelligent and alive and funny actor,'' says Secretary director Steven Shainberg. ''There are few good parts for women, ever. It's particularly hard when you're not, you know, Kate Bosworth, who's fine and all that. But Maggie doesn't look like that and isn't like that. She tries to find [projects] that have a little bit more meat.''

And if ever there were a weighty topic, it's 9/11. Stone's decision to cast Gyllenhaal in WTC last July caused a stir — especially in the blogosphere — because of a controversial statement she'd made at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival: ''America has done reprehensible things and is responsible in some way'' for the terrorist attacks.

''What I meant to say,'' she explains now, ''is that the most patriotic thing we can do is to look at how we, as Americans, can amend our lives to help the situation that we find ourselves in.''

With Stone's film arriving in theaters August 9, Gyllenhaal expects she'll be repeatedly pressed to clarify her remarks. ''I've tried to be as honest as I can about what I meant,'' she says. ''I don't want anyone to feel alienated by my being in the movie. So anyone ask me anything you want — I'm open.''

Gyllenhaal is trying not to speculate on how her flurry of releases will affect her career (''I'm not sure what will change — maybe nothing, maybe a lot,'' she says). And while she would like to keep on with the studio films, reasoning, ''It's more important for me [now] that people actually see the movies I make,'' she doesn't know when she'll go back to work after the arrival of a mini Gyllengaard in October.

''Peter and I will probably take turns,'' says the mother-to-be. ''But I don't usually plan that way. My life will roll out the way it's supposed to.''

With that, she slips on her sunglasses and sets off in search of a late-afternoon ice cream cone, trying to dodge shutterbugs. But they're dogged, those photographers. And the next day, her photo appears in the pages of a tabloid.