Interview

TB: How different is your take on her from the way she's played by Katie Holmes?

MG: I don't think anyone had an investment in me imitating what she did. I just took the ball from her. I have no idea if people think it's similar or not.

TB: Someone once wrote about your "screwball glamour" and there is something in you that reminds me of Jean Arthur and Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert, the great funny ladies of the '30s and '40s. That would be a perfect note in a movie like The Dark Knight-

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

TB: You've done parts that were very intense. Did you live them? Sherry Swanson, for instance. Did you find it hard to leave that woman behind you?

MG: When you're the lead in a movie, when you're in every moment of the movie, it's hard not to live it. We shot Sherrybaby in 25 days. I was never in my own clothes. I would get into her clothes, be her all day, come home, fall asleep, wake up, go back to work. I do better in that kind of work. 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. So I shot all these fucked-up scenes that were really horrible, but I didn't experience them that way. Obviously, 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. And I got over it. 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.

TB: Were you in therapy when you did that film?

MG: Mm-hmm.

TB: So was it exorcism? Catharsis?

MG: Well, that stuff is private, but every role --I choose-whether consciously or -unconsciously-there's something in it that I have to think about and work through.

TB: How do actors do what they do? Is it something you've got that other people don't, or is it something you lack that other people have?

MG: I'm sure both. [laughs] It's a really weird job.

TB: You're rolling around naked on a dirty floor in New Jersey, and that's your job-

MG: Exactly! You can't say to a baby, "I had a hard day playing a drug addict who just got out of prison. Sorry, honey." A mom has to be available.

TB: Is that a new sense of responsibility?

MG: I don't know if it's responsibility as much as a desire to express something different. For a while, I got into taking someone really fucked up and showing the audience how they were beautiful and lovable. That's a way of practicing compassion. But now I want to play a queen! I want to play someone who's thinking and powerful and elegant and not so wayward. I feel like a big change has happened.