Sexy and edgy Maggie Gyllenhaal appears on the cover of the most recent issue of Interview. Photographed by Bryan Adams and in conversation with Tim Blanks, Miss Maggie talks about “playing coy, playing house, playing druggy ex-cons, playing movie star, and never playing it safe.”

On playing Rachel Dawes:

She’s [not] much of a girl in peril. She’s had a complicated set of circumstances to work herself through… Aaron Eckhart used to joke that any time I was supposed to be in peril, I had a real problem with it. I was trying to figure out a way that it wasn’t exactly what was happening.

On whether taking a role in The Dark Knight is an “investment in mainstream Hollywood”:

When I decided to do the movie, it wasn’t… Now I really feel I want to make movies that people see. I want to play strong, beautiful, powerful, elegant women. Now I really feel like there is something about mainstream Hollywood that I absolutely embrace. I’ve shed that adolescent part of myself that wasn’t interested in it before.

On turning 30:

I see women 35, 36, a little older than me…and they have something that I admire and aspire to, so I’m looking forward to the rest of the decade. I’m actually just 30 and a half now, so I don’t have a whole lot of hindsight on this yet.

On her role as drug addict Sherry Swanson:

What I found with Sherry was that she was in such a rough place that she didn’t have the luxury to feel any kind of self-pity or to fall apart at all, or she would not have been able to survive… I understood that all the things that happened in the movie were painful for her, but I didn’t really let that into the work. Then all the terrible things I’ve had to go through surfaced after we’d finished filming… I don’t think I could play that part now. I don’t know that I could be okay with the things I had to be okay with in order to play her.

On whether her “screwball glamour” a la Jean Arthur/Carole Lombard/Claudette Colbert was appropriate for The Dark Knight:

It’s a pretty dark movie. But sometimes qualities come out despite what an actor is in.

Maggie is adorable, and I agree with Blanks’ assessment of her as “a broad-in-waiting, the kinda-wanna-sorta brunette wo cracked wise through Hollywood’s Golden Age.” She’s just one of the many reasons that I can’t wait to see The Dark Knight. I think she’ll be a much more vibrant Rachel Dawes than Katie Holmes. Meanwhile, peep the rest of the Interview scans. You won’t be sorry!

Photo Source: Maggie-Gyllenhaal.net

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