Is it hard to balance work and motherhood?

“That’s constantly on my mind. When do I sacrifice? When do I ask the child to sacrifice? It’s really hard. I haven’t done that perfectly. I don’t think you really can. Peter said to me the other day, ‘How are either of us ever going to work?’ We haven’t quite figured out how this is going to work, but we will.”

Will you have more kids?

“I don’t know. I think I’ll start with two and see how it goes.”

Do you have a mom’s group in Brooklyn, where you live?

“Most of my girlfriends now have kids. I was pretty young when I had Ramona [28]. I was the first of most of my friends and now all of them have lapped me. I think for me this was the way to do it. We’ll see how it goes.”

Your new movie – about the invention of the vibrator – is a quirky choice. What attracted you to the movie?

“I was curious how that could make for a movie. Honestly, the script was really excellent. The movie was very much like it, quick-witted and well-crafted. And I really like [her character]. She’s a whirlwind. I thought the thing to do with her was to let her be from another planet, as wild as possible.”

You’ve filmed an HBO pilot based on Jonathan Franzen’s best seller The Corrections. Did you read it before?

“I am a book reader, [but] I didn’t read it until they asked me to. I have a hard time reading anything that isn’t fiction, including the news. It’s easier for me sometimes to listen to it.”

Do you have a pile of books next to your bed that you try to get through?

“I’ve been finishing all of them for some reason. Pregnant, I’ve just been reading so much. Usually, I have one book I’m slogging through. You know what it was? Peter was away shooting a movie in L.A. He would come back and forth, but I would have a lot of my nights free because I’d be too tired to go out and meet a friend, but not tired enough to go to sleep at 8 o’clock. So I’d do a lot of reading.”

Are you reading them in book form or do you have an iPad or book reader?

“I have an iPad that I read on, but if I’m not traveling, I really prefer reading in the real book form. I feel like I’m looking at my phone all day.”

Are you a TV watcher?

“Peter and I both got into Enlightened. I love Laura Dern and the weird mix of people on that show. You know what else I love? Downton Abbey. I’m obsessed.”

Do you have hidden talents?

“I make really good salad dressing. Lemon, vinegar, salt and pepper. I think I’ve really mastered it.”

Is this the life you had planned when you were younger and imagining your future?

“So much when you’re growing up of what you imagine really is fantasy. So much about getting older and living your life is about finding the reality inside that’s very, very different than the fantasy.”

Does your brother [actor Jake Gyllenhaal] feel like he should be [having kids]?

“You have to ask him. He was pretty young [24] when I started. I had Ramona when I was 28, I liked that actually, although there was so much I didn’t know which I guess is true whenever you do it.”

Are you committed to raising your family in New York?

“I’ve been here since I was 17. [She was born in New York but raised in Los Angeles.] And I came to college here [she has a bachelor’s in English from Columbia University]. I lived in such a different way then, and I thought I’d be here forever, and anybody who left was wimping out. But now I think, ‘Wow, what a different life we could have if we lived in Northern California or anywhere. I dream about living in Paris. But now our daughter’s in school, happy, really got a life. I wouldn’t say I’ve found our home that we’re going to be in forever; we’re still figuring it out.”

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Parenthood just became twice as nice for Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard.

The couple welcomed their second child, daughter Gloria Ray, on April 19 in New York City, a rep for Gyllenhaal tells the Daily News.

This is the second child for the “Hysteria” actress, 34, and the “Lovelace” actor, 41, who are already parents to daughter Ramona, 5. The couple, together since 2002, wed in Italy in 2009.

Pregnancy proved to be somewhat of a challenge for Gyllenhaal when it came time to be in the spotlight.

“I find it difficult to pretend you’re not pregnant, which I had to do,” she told USA Today in March. “I didn’t let anyone know until three and a half months this time.

“I went to film festivals. I’m throwing up in the bathroom and having to keep pretzels in my purse, and having to fit into dresses.”

Sarsgaard, on the other hand, had other concerns on his mind. Namely, how he was going to prepare Ramona for their growing family.

“I’ve seen kids with siblings — I don’t have any siblings, so I don’t know — but they generally go for about five minutes, ‘Oh, cool! Anyway, what are we going to do now? Can we return it?’” he told reporters in February. “I think it gets boring quickly, at first, and it takes a while for them to bond.”

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“We keep calling it the thinking woman’s romantic comedy,” says Wexler, “but it’s supposed to be fun. A lot of people ask what’s the message in the movie? It’s supposed to be fun. It doesn’t take a doctor to do it.” Determined to bring light-heartedness to the set, Wexler gifted every arriving cast and crew member with a vibrator. “You could tell some of the crew guys were confused about what to do with it,” she says with a laugh. “I told them to give it to their wives.”

Hysteria screens at next week’s Tribeca Film Festival and opens in select theaters on May 18.

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The actress is expecting a second daughter later this year. She’ll join big sister Ramona, 5.

“I’m so pregnant,” says Gyllenhaal, 34, while promoting her May release Hysteria. “This is a great, loose, black outfit — I had to take my shoes off.”

Gyllenhaal attended various premieres while secretly expecting her second child, not an easy feat for her.

“I find it difficult to pretend you’re not pregnant, which I had to do. I didn’t let anyone know until three and a half months this time. I went to film festivals. I’m throwing up in the bathroom and having to keep pretzels in my purse, and having to fit into dresses,” she says.

Gyllenhaal and hubby Peter Sarsgaard don’t plan on selling any baby photos, and Gyllenhaal won’t reveal her due date to preserve her privacy and not tip off the press.

“I hope they don’t make an issue of it this time,” says Gyllenhaal. “I have to think about that stuff.”

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Sunday, April 22, 2012 at 8:00pm on VPT
Monday, April 23, 2012 at 12:30am on VPT
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 3:00am on VPT

Many American descend from a dense soups of European ethnicities; we could call them mutts, with ancestral roots across every country in Europe. Actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey, Jr. are textbook examples of Americans with a rich tapestry of European immigrant stories making up their family trees. We delve in to their deep American roots in early colonial communities, and we meet their Eastern European Jewish ancestors, who share almost identical migration stories From the Mayflower to Ellis Island, we journey through centuries of immigration that shaped and built our melting pot nation.

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Other films to screen at this year’s festival are Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in New York; Persepolis directors Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Chicken with Plums; Hysteria, a historical rom-com about the invention of the vibrator, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hugh Dancy; Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman; and Struck By Lightning, a teen comedy written by and starring “Glee“‘s Chris Colfer.

In addition, Tribeca has announced the five films that will comprise its Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival, which will kick off with the world premiere of the documentary Benji, about the life and death of high school basketball phenom Ben Wilson, whose murder one day before the start of his senior season in 1984 shocked his home city of Chicago and the nation.

Tribeca’s short film lineup will be announced next week; to find out more about the features to screen at the festival, visit www.tribecafilm.com/festival.

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“Everyday there’s crazy cravings. Less so this one than the last pregnancy,” Peter shared with OK!. “The last pregnancy was more craving oriented, but we went for dinner before coming here and she has not been into eating meat. So — it’s been recommended for the iron — we ordered it and we both just looked at it because I don’t eat a lot of meat either. So we just sort of sat there and stared at it, thought about it.”

While Maggie and Peter may not be adjusting to the idea of eating meat, their daughter seems to be adjusting just fine to being a big sister. Peter just hopes that it lasts!

“I think at this point she doesn’t know what she’s in for. It all sounds good,” he explained to OK!. “The thing is, I’ve seen kids with siblings. I don’t have any siblings so I don’t know. They kind of generally go for about five minutes, they go, ‘Oh, cool! Anyway, what do we do now?’ I think it gets kind of boring quickly at first. It takes a while for kids to bond.”

So, do Maggie and Peter know the gender of the baby?

“We do, but we’re not sharing,” Peter said and added that they have’t picked out a name yet. But they have a few picked out!

“I always think it’s nice to have… I think that there were two, maybe, or three [names picked out] for Ramona, like the week before. Then it’s not so bad to have an optional one, and when they’re born you kind of look at them and you go, ‘You are a…’ (snaps fingers). And then if another one occurs to you, you might pick that one, but it’s nice to have a lot of planning going into it.”

“And also, as pregnancies go, you sort of start using the names, you try a couple of different ones. Maybe for a month, you might say one name for a while. It’s the nice thing about knowing the gender of the child, you don’t have to call it ‘it.’ Which gets to be really weird after it’s like seven months in there. So we’ve been trying out a few names, but nothing solid.”

Well, we’re sure they’ll pick out a good one when the time comes!

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Rudin selected the team behind his Oscar-nominated film “The Hours,” writer David Hare and director Stephen Daldry, for the project back in 2002. Daldry stepped off a few years later, with Robert Zemeckis replacing him as director, but the film never came to pass. Instead, the adaptation found new life moving ahead as an HBO series, with writer-director Noah Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale,” “Greenberg“) at the helm, and a cast full of A-listers and Oscar-winners forming. Not only that, Frazen has co-written the pilot with Baumbach, in addition to co-writing every single episode of the first season and is an executive producer of the series.

Chris Cooper and Dianne Wiest were the first on board, as Alfred and Enid Lambert, the parents of a dysfunctional Midwestern family, while Ewan McGregor signed on not long after to play their middle son Chip, a disgraced socialist professor. And now a few more big names look to be coming aboard, as Baz Bamgiboye reports that Maggie Gyllenhaal and Rhys Ifans are both in early talks to join the project.  Gyllenaal, would play Denise, the Lamberts’ youngest daughter, a bisexual Philadelphia chef, while Ifans would play, in what’s described as a cameo, a Lithuanian gangster who draws McGregor’s character into his world.

Update: Deadline reports that Greta Gerwig and Bruce Norris are also coming on board. Gerwig will play Chip’s soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend and a film producer, while Norris will play the older brother Gary, a successful yet depressed banker with a drinking problem.

While it’s been known for a while that Baumbach would be writing and directing the pilot for the network, it’s been unclear what the game plan beyond that would be. A five-part mini-series like “Mildred Pierce?” Or something more open-ended, like “The Sopranos?” For the first time, it’s starting to crystallize. According to Bamigboye, should the two-hour pilot impress HBO executives (something that seems all but a certainty, given the pedigree involved), the intention is for there to be four seasons of ten episodes each, a far longer run than we’d realistically guessed.

And it does give us a little pause. Can a forty-hour take on a 550 page book feel anything but languid and padded-out? We’re assuming the intention is to depart from the source material, but it does feel like an awful lot of time. Then again, with a cast like this, it could be the equivalent of twenty new Noah Baumbach movies over four years, and we’re not sure we’d complain too much about that prospect.

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My mother was very politically active and taught both my brother and me that it is everyone’s responsibility as a citizen and as a person in the world to fight for what you believe in. And what I believe very strongly is that every woman has the right to decide what she can do with her body.

That seems like a no-brainer to me, but it’s not to some politicians; they’re working to restrict women’s access to reproductive health services—things like cancer screenings, birth control and abortion care. With jobs bills waiting on legislative calendars, the unemployment rate at a crisis level and many Americans losing their homes, I find it incredibly frustrating that we’re being forced to spend so much time and energy (and, yes, money) defending something as basic as self-determination.

The assaults on women’s health care have been fast and furious. Over 80 abortion restrictions were enacted in 2011—more than double the previous record, in 2005. But it’s not just abortion that’s under fire. Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry dramatically cut funding that would have provided many low-income women with cervical cancer screenings, birth control and STD prevention and treatment. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey slashed $7.5 million from his state’s budget meant for family planning centers that provide birth control and Pap tests. And there are dozens more examples all over the country. (You can visit Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s womenarewatching.org to see where some 2012 candidates stand on these issues.)

Many of these attacks are designed to shut down one provider: Planned Parenthood, the only health care provider to have been targeted by name in recent federal legislation. Restricting access to the services Planned Parenthood provides would affect millions of women—one in five American women turns to a Planned Parenthood health center at some point in her life. And more than 90 percent of these centers’ services are in preventive care; 3 percent are in abortion care.

I find these restrictions dismaying because they disproportionately target women with lower incomes. Wealthy women will always be able to access the health care they need. Planned Parenthood is there for every woman. This is an organization that works in communities to provide high-quality care like cervical cancer screenings, breast exams, HIV tests and birth control—often to women who would otherwise go without. It is the place you call if you are 16 and don’t know whom to ask about birth control. It’s the website that has answers in the middle of the night. It’s the health care resource that offers compassion and respect to women at times when they are incredibly vulnerable and afraid.

I’ve been a Planned Parenthood supporter my whole life—since my mom took me to a rally when I was in sixth grade. It’s chilling to think of this resource being taken away. I have a five-year-old daughter, and I’m pregnant with my second child. I know when my children are older, I will be taking them to events like the one I went to with my mom. I hope we’ll be celebrating our freedoms and rights, not fighting for them once again as we are now.

Oscar-nominated Maggie Gyllenhaal stars in next month’s Won’t Back Down.

The stunning star admits that although she always tries her hardest to look good on the red carpet, there are going to be inevitable slip-ups. Maggie has revealed that hunting for lots of glamorous gowns can be tricky.

“For the premiere of Hysteria in Toronto a few months ago, I was pregnant but no-one knew. I also had flu and my dress didn’t fit well as the zip was broken,” she told the French edition of Elle. “The day after, I had a look on the internet and saw so many terrible comments! But this is the life of an actress, you have good days and bad days, and when you are promoting a movie and we have to find 15 different dresses per week, yes, one of them might be less perfect than the others.”

Maggie recently announced that she is expecting her second child with her husband Peter Sarsgaard. The actress has confessed that it is difficult to find time to exercise while she is working and caring for her five-year-old daughter, Ramona.

“Honestly, I don’t know how mothers who are working find time to go do exercise. I can’t be a wife, a mother, an actress and run every day,” she shrugged.

“So, I have to admit that I find it easier to forget to run than to cook dinner for my daughter.”

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