Fresh off an Emmy nomination and Golden Globe win for her work in SundanceTV’s The Honourable Woman, Maggie Gyllenhaal will play a hooker in a prestige drama, which is normally how you take home an Oscar. Except this prestige drama, David Simon’s The Deuce, is on HBO, where she’ll join James Franco to explore the world of 1970s-1980s pornography in New York.
Gyllenhaal has been cast as Eileen Merrell, a lady of the Times Square night who’s also a “veteran with an entrepreneurial bent… drawn into the fledgling porn industry.”
But will she have a heart of gold? (Yes.)
The Deuce follows the story of the legalization and subsequent rise of the porn industry in New York of the early 1970s and continues through the mid-1980s. The long-in-the-works entry will explore the rough-and-tumble world that existed in midtown Manhattan until the rise of HIV, the violence of the cocaine epidemic and the renewed real estate market all ended the bawdy turbulence. Named for 42nd Street, The Deuce is inspired in part by the career of twin brothers who were players in the Times Square world and became fronts for Mob control of the volatile and lucrative sex industry from its origins. (Via)
Simon described The Deuce as being about “porn, prostitution, pimps, the Mob, after-hours nightlife, institutional corruption, and New York in its Wild West heyday.” That all sounds wonderful, and I’m sure this will be a great show, because Simon is great, Maggie Gyllenhaal is great, and James Franco is, um, James Franco. But if it’s a bomb, Simon really set himself up for headlines like, “The Deuce Takes A Deuce.” Either way, we all win.
(Via the Hollywood Reporter)
