“I learned how to work when I was 35,” she said. “I learned how to sit with a script, and take the time, not just learn your lines.” She explained her process: “I learned how to use my mind, where I am as a person right now, and the fiction of the piece I’m doing to make my heart and brain bigger.”

That being said, the actor also leaves room for error and discovery. “Just yesterday, I walked onto the set of The Deuce and I was like, ‘I know for sure this’ and I was completely wrong,” she revealed. “On The Honorable Woman I learned how to work, and on The Kindergarten Teacher and the end of The Deuce Season 1, I learned how to really throw it away. I did the work, I did the thinking, and now I don’t know where we’re going to go.”

Speaking to The Deuce, and the clip shown — from “What Kind of Bad” [Season 1, Episode 5] where Gyllenhaal’s character, Candy, gives herself an orgasm after her date is unable to — Hunt asked the actor to speak to her feelings about sex on film. Gyllenhaal made the point that it’s always interesting, as long as it’s part of the scene.

“I love that scene because it’s a communication of something,” she elaborated. “It’s political, emotional, it’s new. It’s an expression of so many things that are important to me... Sex sometimes is a way of communicating things that can’t be communicated any other way, both in life and on film.”

She admitted, however, that after several episodes, she did grow tired of sex scenes but she put the frustration into her work: “I think that’s how Candy felt: ‘I’m f**king over it, and I want to be behind the camera; I believe there’s another way to get what I need.’” Gyllenhaal herself is starting to look at the seat behind the camera, having recently shadowed Deuce director Uta Briesewitz while filming a recent episode.

The Deuce marks the first time Gyllenhaal has returned to a character, with the added intrigue that she’s a different person and artist than when she first signed on to the show. “In our show the first season is 1971 and the second is 1978-79, so the changes and the shifts in who I am can work great in terms of who Candy is. But I’m finding myself in a kind of transition.”



All episodes of The Deuce Season 1 and 2 are now available to stream.