TRULY, DEEPLY, MAGGIE

The planets have aligned. With four movies in theatres this fall and her first baby due next month, Maggie Gyllenhaal is having a moment.

Whenever Maggie Gyllenhaal starts thinking about how to portray a role in a new movie, the first thing she focuses on is wardrobe. "Clothing for me, is expressive,” she explains. “It’s very important to me that I feel connected to what I’m wearing. ”She likes to play around with how women convey sexiness, using clothing to reveal character, such as sporting a revealing yellow halter top (for a role as an ex-con) or showing a more subtle sensuality (playing a pastry chef) with “gauzy things that looked like they were falling off.”

On this sunny summer afternoon, Gyllenhaal is sitting in a Japanese restaurant in New York City’s Soho, looking radiantly rumpled. Life has now imitated art in her wardrobe choices. In Oliver Stone’s new movie, World Trade Center, she plays the six-months-pregnant wife of a Port Authority cop trapped in the 9/11 rubble. Shortly after the film wrapped, Gyllenhaal discovered that she herself was pregnant. She has traded a fake big belly for the real thing.

Now on the verge of having her baby, she laughingly confesses that she had no idea what she was in for, physically. “My breasts have grown two-and-a-half cups,” she says, sounding shocked, “which has been very hard to get used to.” And she’s a little bit anxious about dressing for the upcoming press tour. “I used to be able to look at a dress and think, That’ll work, but now things wont’ fit over my breasts, let alone my belly.”