There is a key moment in the complex thriller “The Honorable Woman” where Maggie Gyllenhaal wasn’t quite sure what her character was thinking.
“I was crying when we shot that scene. I just took my clothes off. I don’t know why I was in my underwear, either,” says the 36-year-old actress. “I think even then as an actor, I didn’t want to see what my character was going to do.”
In the eight-part miniseries airing on Sundance TV beginning Thursday, Gyllenhaal plays Nessa Stein, the daughter of an Israeli arms manufacturer who was assassinated when she was a child. Growing up in England, Nessa becomes an idealistic business leader, seeking to unite Israelis and Palestinians through high-speed broadband in the West Bank.
While she is respected by those from both sides on the volatile issue, a mysterious death and the kidnapping of the young son of her brother’s Palestinian housekeeper (Lubna Azabal) suddenly turn Nessa’s life upside down. As forces dangerously close in around her, she is forced to make difficult life-and-death decisions, some questionable for a woman who has prided herself on doing the right thing.
“I think at the beginning, Nessa has an oversimplified idea of what it means to be good and what it means to be honorable,” says Gyllenhaal. “Everyone is compromised; everyone is damaged. That’s the nature of being alive in the world and being a human being.”
For most of her career, the actress, who has two children and is married to actor Peter Sarsgaard, has pursued roles on stage and in films. Her first break was in the sexually charged “Secretary” (2002), in which she plays a mentally ill woman who develops a sadomasochistic relationship with her boss (James Spader).
In 2004, she starred in Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul” at the Mark Taper Forum as a young woman searching for her mother in Afghanistan.
She also appeared in the offbeat 2006 comedy “Stranger Than Fiction” with Will Ferrell and “The Dark Knight” (2008). She was nominated for an Oscar for her role in “Crazy Heart” (2009).
She soon will be seen in the musical dramedy “Frank” opposite Michael Fassbender, and in the fall she will make her Broadway debut in a revival of Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing.”
“The Honorable Woman,” which also stars Janet McTeer and Stephen Rea, is Gyllenhaal’s first extended foray into television. It is written and directed by Hugo Blick, who — like David Chase (“The Sopranos”) and David Simon (“The Wire”) — very much controls the production.
“Every few years of my career, a project comes along that feels really special, and that you do anything you can for,” says Gyllenhaal, who is enthusiastic in her praise for Blick. “I feel more proud of this than anything I’ve made so far.”
The actress says the miniseries was a special collaboration and that she really enjoyed her experience with Blick, a former actor, but that they have different methods of working.
“He likes to talk and I don’t like to talk when I’m working. I like to work on some kind of subliminal level, I guess, and he totally got that.”
The pair, though, did talk over dinner about that key scene featuring a one-way phone conversation where Nessa’s emotional words are cryptic. When Blick explained what was going on to the actress, “I said, ‘No — no, I think she is in love with him,’ ” she says, referring to a character played by Tobias Menzies (“Rome,” “Game of Thrones”).
It could well be that Nessa is in love, but the scene goes to the moral complexity of “The Honorable Woman.”
“With a really good script, you have maybe an infinite number of possibilities of how a scene is expressed,” says Gyllenhaal.
“So you don’t have to change the lines. You see what happens. And that’s just so rare. I can’t even tell you how rare that is. And this was one of the cases where it happened all the time.”
“The Honorable Woman,” which is airing currently in Britain, comes out at a time of renewed hostilities in the Gaza Strip. Blick wrote the miniseries about 18 months ago when it was a relatively peaceful time in the region.
“It got so quiet that people forget that it exists. But it is cyclical,” Blick says about the ongoing crisis. “Now it has tragically become this hot spot yet again. No one could have predicted that this would happen at this time.”
Blick’s idea was to make the thriller a “mosaic” that makes the audience the detective.
“It presents an idea, and you’re asked to hold onto that idea and then think about what it means.”
Gyllenhaal agrees. “The show does not say, ‘This is what we think is right. This is what we think is wrong.’ Instead I think it actually really truly asks the person who is watching it to think about what they think is right and what they think is wrong.”
Having grown up in a politically active family in Los Angeles along with her brother, actor Jake Gyllenhaal, the actress believes “It’s an individual’s responsibility to be informed and speak out against that which you feel is wrong or unjust.”
Yet she refrains from taking a position on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. She does feel what she has in common with Nessa is a hopefulness.
“I would say about the piece in general is that it never takes the idea of reconciliation off the table. It’s never hopeless.”
