Maggie Gyllenhaal On Directing Jake Gyllenhaal, Early Feelings Of Envy

Maggie Gyllenhaal discussed her experience directing her brother, actor Jake Gyllenhaal, in her forthcoming Gothic romance movie The Bride!

In a sprawling discussion with The New York Times, she explained, “I waited until I was absolutely sure that asking him to do this part in the movie — it’s a pretty small part, it’s just a cameo, really — I made sure, I really did some work in thinking to make sure it was the right thing to do to ask him.”

The Lost Daughter filmmaker described “tearing up” while broaching the subject with her sibling, adding with a laugh that she “waited too long … that was a rookie mistake.”

“It meant so much to me,” she added, given that she strived early on in her career to distinguish herself from her filmmaker father, screenwriter mother and fellow performer brother. She said she and the Brokeback Mountain star have “never been estranged but we’ve never been as close as we are now.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Maggie Gyllenhaal described her fascination with envy and having felt some latent feelings of jealousy toward her brother’s early movie stardom.

“In general, I am very interested in envy. I think there’s a reason why it’s a seven deadly sin. I’m interested in it in terms of watching other people’s movies come out. Admiration versus envy. What creates it? I think it’s usually feeling starving, like you don’t have enough,” she said, while also noting that taking a beat to reach out to Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell “free[d] the competition up and you realize: ‘No, no. We’re actually 100 percent on the same team. There absolutely is enough to go around.’”

She concluded, “I don’t think I knew that at first, when I was young and Jake was a movie star right away. I don’t think I was in touch with the envy, but it was there.”

The Bride! — due in theaters March 6 — stars Jessie Buckley (in the title role), Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard (also Maggie Gyllenhaal’s spouse), Annette Bening and Penélope Cruz. It loosely draws inspiration from the 1935 classic Bride of Frankenstein, itself based on Mary Shelley’s landmark novel.