Laid Bare

For Maggie Gyllenhaal, taking a role on The Deuce was a trust exercise, in more ways than one.

- Alex Morris

MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL and David Simon were having a civilized lunch one day when she mentioned, ever so calmly, that she wanted to masturbate on television. “I told him, and he sort of pretended to spit his water out,” she says, arranging her long body on the short wooden chair of a coffee shop not far from her Brooklyn brownstone. Gyllenhaal and Simon were discussing her role in The Deuce, the new HBO series from Simon, the creator of The Wire, and George Pellecanos, about the birth of the 42nd Street porn scene. Gyllenhaal had received the first three scripts as well as an offer to play Candy, a 1970s prostitute, which she thought would be “a very delicate thing to do in 2017.” The scripts were compelling, but Gyllenhaal didn’t know where her character’s story would go or what she, as an actor, would ultimately be asked to do. “When David called me, I said to him, ‘Obviously, my body is going to be required, but I also want to know that you’re interested in my mind. And that’s going to be part of what comes with having me in this process,’ ” she recalls now. “He was like, ‘I need you to trust me.’ And I was like, ‘I want to, but …’ ”