Interview

TB: Was turning 30 a milestone moment for you?

MG: I didn't expect it to be, but it ended up that way. Not the actual birthday, but some kind of general shift happened. 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 lot of hindsight on this yet.

TB: Does turning 30 make you ready for anything the world can throw at you?

MG: No, I don't think it makes me ready for anything the world can throw at me. But it's funny the way celebrity stuff has been a part of my life and how much I've learned already. I'm not very good at something unless I find some way to enjoy it. It's like figuring out how to do press for a movie, how to talk about it, what about it I'm going to bring to light. I have to find things that are interesting to me. And I have to say that I have been enjoying this. When you have a baby, there's a part of it where your body is your baby. I was nursing Ramona during all the Sherrybaby [2006] stuff, going to the Golden Globes and Academy Awards, and my body was totally different. It was hers, you know? Now I feel like I'm mine again, and I feel inspired by that. I'm really looking for something interesting to work on. I haven't found it. But I feel ready to be in my body and be a woman in a different way, and be an actress in a different way.

TB: You said that every time you put on a new outfit, you're thinking, Who am I?

MG: That's very true. Shopping is that way. Hair and makeup are interesting for me because I never wore makeup growing up. My mother doesn't wear makeup, she cuts her hair really short, never dyes it, doesn't even shave her legs. I never learned any of that. I've had to find it as an adult. My late twenties were when I really started to think about the joys of being a woman.

TB: Have you learned from your characters? You've said that even though Sherry Swanson, your character in Sherrybaby, dressed inappropriately, it was appropriate for what she wanted to do. I loved that.

MG: Well, that's true of any character. I remember going into the first costume fitting. They had these short little jean skirts and blue fingernails, and someone said, "I love that, it's so awful!" But I thought that comment was so judgmental. I thought, "What would somebody who is basically 16 in her mind, who has been in prison for three years, imagine was both professional and sexy? Why shouldn't a professional person be sexy?" Instead of, This girl's a real tart! I couldn't think like that. When I wore her clothes all the time, I felt comfortable in them. Like a low-cut yellow braless tank-top. I wouldn't feel comfortable in that for me, but I did feel comfortable in that as her, because I understood where it came from.

TB: Does that liberate you in the way that you dress for yourself?

MG: I don't think I'm particularly uptight about the way I dress. [laughs] So I don't know that I need liberating in that way. But some of this actress stuff has informed my life. When I was pregnant, I grew my hair. I'd never had long hair before, but when I did the photo shoot for this magazine, I cut it off. The man doing my hair said, "As an actress, I just thought you might want your hair long until you have a part that requires you to cut it in a certain way." I said, "Yeah, but I'm also a woman! Who wants to feel beautiful and sexy! And so I have the right to cut my hair the way I want to cut my hair!" So then that's exactly what I did!

TB: Rachel's got long, dark, girl-in-peril hair in The Dark Knight?

MG: I doubt she's much of a girl in peril. She's had a complicated set of circumstances to work herself through. She is "the girl in the Batman movie" on some level. 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.