Hiding In Plain Sight
by Mark Seal
Hiding in Plain Sight
Stranger than Fiction's Maggie Gyllenhaal was
overwhelmed by New York at first. But when she found the little
shops and cafés that led her into the world inside the city, that
changed. . Photograph by Justin Stephens.
I like the edges of New York," says
Maggie Gyllenhaal, star
of this month's
Stranger than Fiction, a comedy about a
novelist (played by Emma Thompson) who's struggling to complete her
latest book - if only she can find a way to kill off her main
character, a supposedly fictional IRS agent named Harold Crick
(Will Ferrell). But Crick is actually alive and well in the real
world and suddenly aware of the author's words and intentions.
Fighting for survival, he enters an unlikely romance with a wild
and crazy tattooed pastry chef, played by Gyllenhaal.
Though the part is a bit of a stretch for the big-eyed,
apple-cheeked Gyllenhaal, the fairy-tale nature of the film isn't
that different from her reality: She lives something of a storybook
life amid the bakeries and bookstores of
New York City. We're not
talking about mainstream Manhattan but about what she calls the
unlikely yet fascinating "edges" of the metropolis. She was born
in NYC but moved at a young age to
Los Angeles with her show
business family. Her mother, Naomi Foner, is a screenwriter who was
nominated for an Oscar for
Running on Empty, and her father,
Stephen Gyllenhaal, is a much-lauded television and film director.
Her brother is, of course, Jake Gyllenhaal, who has starred in
films like
Jarhead, Donnie Darko, and last year's Oscar
contender
Brokeback Mountain. It wasn't until college that
Gyllenhaal was able to return to New York, where she studied
literature at
Columbia University; she graduated in 1999.
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