Maggie Gyllenhaal Gives Marilyn Monroe Her Next Act

It’s 5 p.m. in South Korea, and Maggie Gyllenhaal has arrived at the Busan Cinema Center. Inside the theater, the lights dim as a crowd of journalists and fans settles in, notebooks and iPhones at the ready. Despite a 14-hour journey across the pond herself, the writer-director appears bright-eyed as she takes center stage. Her hair is cut into a simple, lightly mussed bob, side-parted just so; her nails are freshly lacquered cherry red. She cradles the microphone in one hand, the other tucked close to her waist. “In New York, it's like, four in the morning, so this is going to be the trippiest Q&A you guys have ever heard,” she laughs.

The reason for her trip is the Asian premiere of Flesh Impact, a 17-minute short film imagining Marilyn Monroe at 100, commissioned by luxury car brand, Genesis. For the evening, she wears an olive-brown, long-sleeved gown, artfully gathered at the waist. It’s a fittingly understated entrance for a filmmaker revisiting one of Hollywood’s most overexposed stars, and asking what might remain when the bombshell image begins to fade.

Across nations, languages, and cultures, we know the myth by heart: the platinum blonde curls, breathy voice, beauty mark, and emphasized hourglass silhouette. Practically public domain, Monroe has inspired personas from material-loving Madonna to sultry, bleached blonde Anna Nicole Smith, and flirtatious Sabrina Carpenter. Six decades after her death at 36, no square inch of Monroe’s sex appeal has been left unexplored. But beyond the pin curls and bustiers, the woman herself remains an enigma. For Gyllenhaal, the question isn’t just what Monroe might have looked like at 100, but who she might have become.

In Flesh Impact, Ellen Burstyn plays an imagined centenarian Monroe who walks unannounced into a New York theater to audition for a Broadway role written for a beautiful 25-year-old woman. The director, played by Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard, points out the obvious obstacle. Monroe, naturally, isn’t deterred. Instead, she launches into a monologue about her life, with Dakota Johnson appearing in ghostly flashes as her younger self. Her story moves between an orphaned childhood, doomed marriages, abuse at the hands of the studio system, and the dizzying heights of Tinseltown stardom, all while reckoning with the strange burden of becoming a woman the world could recognize without ever really knowing.

The film takes its title from a phrase director Billy Wilder reportedly used to describe Monroe’s screen presence, which seemed so tangible that audiences felt they could “reach out and touch her.” (An idea, to which Burstyn’s Monroe poignantly adds, “And everybody did.”)

From the director’s chair, two-time Academy award nominee Gyllenhaal knows something about that reality. “I guess I do relate to the way that she was consumed, and what that feels like,” she says during the post-screening Q&A. By digging through Monroe’s filmography and historical footage, Gyllenhaal began to “see a really wide spectrum of feelings, even in her really silly, adorable comedies.” The shift helped her look past Monroe’s familiar va-va-voom image to the complicated inner life beneath it. “I survived it, and maybe it just happened to her on such a massive scale that she couldn’t survive it,” she says. “I think there’s just a little whisper of that experience for every actress.”

The short film’s Asia premiere was particularly noteworthy given its commissioning by Korean luxury car brand, Genesis, who approached Gyllenhaal with a simple premise: to honor Monroe’s centennial anniversary. “I wasn’t sure if I would have something to say with that material,” says Gyllenhaal. After letting the idea percolate while editing The Bride, she imagined Monroe not just celebrating her 100th birthday, but actually living to 100. She finished the script in a week, with an estimated 95% of the original script making the final sequence.

From its conception in 2015, Genesis has made a point of investing in the arts and supporting creative work through partnerships with major cultural institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Its commitment extends to filmmaking, too: through initiatives like the Genesis House x The Gotham Shorts Fellowship, the brand provides emerging filmmakers with funding, mentorship, and opportunities to bring their stories to the screen. This is the automobile manufacturer’s latest foray into filmmaking (turns out even car companies want in on the narrative film trend). But before you turn your nose up at the sponsorship, think again: the film keeps the branding subtle, folding in a few subtle details; Monroe arrives at the theater in the unreleased Genesis GV90, complete with swanky coach doors, and her audition is abruptly interrupted when she’s called away to deal with the car’s charging situation.

Genesis’ choice of Monroe also carries a particularly poignant connection to Korea. In February 1954, while honeymooning in Japan with Joe DiMaggio, Monroe made a detour to South Korea to perform for American troops. She delivered 10 shows in four days to an estimated 100,000 service members — an experience she later described as “the best thing that ever happened to me,” adding, “I never felt like a star before in my heart.” More than 70 years later, her legacy returns to the country through a film imagining all the years she never got to live. For Gyllenhaal, the project was also an opportunity to give Monroe the chance to act in a way she may not have been allowed to during her lifetime. “The ask was, ‘Can we give Marilyn the opportunity to act in a way that she maybe wasn’t totally given when she was alive?’” she says. “I needed a great actress in order to do that, or to imagine that, to fantasize that.”

As for casting Marilyn, that was the easy part. “I don’t want to see Dakota do the same things she’s done a million times, I just don’t. I don’t want to see Ellen do the same thing she’s done a million times,” she says. “I want to watch an actor meet a role that requires that they actually learn something about themself in order to play it well.” Burstyn, the 93-year-old Hollywood legend, came to mind for the older Monroe; the two women even once shared a masseur, and Burstyn later acquired Monroe’s original copy of The Thinking Body, complete with the actress’ annotations. Working with Burstyn, Gyllenhaal says, was “like watching someone who has been practicing what they do for 50 more years than I have done it. It was really wildly expert level.”

Johnson, a previous collaborator, was on Gyllenhaal’s mind from the beginning of the writing process, though she “kept pushing her out of [her] head,” she recalls, concerned that the actress didn’t look enough like Monroe. Eventually, she realized that resemblance was beside the point. “What she looks like is much less important than what is happening inside her heart and her mind.”