Maggie Gyllenhaal on Female Artists, the Inspiring City of Venice, and Starting Her Next Project 

Last Friday evening, New York City’s most fashionable lovers of art, culture, and Venice donned elaborate masks, crowns, and even capes to eat, drink and boogie at the Plaza Hotel—all in the name of preserving the artistic heritage of the floating city. In the midst of the action was multihyphenate actor, writer, and director Maggie Gyllenhaal, statuesque and refined in a shimmering gown by Lafayette 148 and donning a lace veil over her close-cropped chestnut hair.

Save Venice, the nonprofit for which all this revelry raises funds, supports the conservation of vulnerable Venetian artwork and is at the forefront of resurrecting work by female artists from the early-modern period who were unacknowledged during their lifetimes. 

But perhaps the past is never as far away as we like to think. Though she’s a celebrated creator now, Gyllenhaal explains that she was no stranger to the battle for recognition—with the person who needed the most convincing being herself. “I never even let myself consider the possibility of being a director,” she says. “There was just so little precedent for it.” Yet Gyllenhaal’s 2021 debut film—The Lost Daughter, which she both adapted from Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name and directed—was an elegant and ominous meditation on the brutality of motherhood. 

Now Gyllenhaal is hard at work on her sophomore screenplay, though she is hesitant to speak about it other than to describe the anxiety that any new endeavor brings. “When you’re doing something new that requires confronting something, there’s also an element of terror—so I’m living with that at the moment,” she says. Emily Smith, creative director for Lafayette 148, gave a playful nod to women writers by featuring splayed book pages dipped in gold leaf on Gyllenhaal’s gown. It was a look that reflected both Gyllenhaal’s effortless cool-girl style and her curious and striking mind.

Gyllenhaal goes on to describe how it wasn’t until she played the character Candy Renee—an entrepreneurial sex worker who blossoms into a radical feminist filmmaker—in the television show The Deuce that she discovered her own ambition to direct. “It was that show where I was pretending to be a director all day, every day, for three years that I thought, I think I would like to do this.” When she first began to see female filmmakers’ work, Gyllenhaal noticed that, like Candy Renee, they brought truly unique perspectives to storytelling that she hadn’t seen in films made by male directors. “I remember being about 16 and seeing The Piano [directed by Jane Campion], and it just completely blew my mind, and I thought, I’m not sure why, but this is speaking to me in a different language,” she says. “I think that’s the same thing with the 10 books that were written by women in the 19th century. We all devour them because there’s something that’s in a slightly different language and we feel it and hear it.”

This sentiment is what makes Gyllenhaal such a perfect partner for Lafayette 148. The company has sponsored the conservation of the 18th-century painting Assumption of the Virgin/Female Saint in Glory by Giulia Lama, an artist who was so unrecognized in her lifetime that even the title of her painting remains a question. The painting’s second life is not only a chance for Lama to finally shine as the dynamic artist she was but also a reflection of the brand’s continued mission to celebrate the accomplishments of ambitious women both in the past and today. 

When asked about her connection to the city of Venice, Gyllenhaal recounts how it was the first place where The Lost Daughter was shown to a collective audience, after COVID-19 restrictions had halted the ability to have screenings. “Usually you would’ve sat in an audience and felt people, felt the mood, but I had never, not one time until I’m at this massive theater in Venice on our opening night,” she says. “I went through such a spectrum of feelings about it, and then it was really seen in Venice, and it was really appreciated in Venice. So I will always love Venice, aside from the fact that it’s an incredible city.” With that, Gyllenhaal was whisked away from the Mercer hotel, where she got dressed, to the Plaza, where, with her lace veil tied over her eyes and the gold on her dress catching the light, she floated up the hotel’s staircase—looking like a piece of Venetian art all unto herself.