Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
Word to the wise: Do not leave your bees in the care of Maggie Gyllenhaal. Her husband, actor and hobbyist beekeeper Peter Sarsgaard, left his bees with Gyllenhaal in Brooklyn one time only to come back and find that they had all died. This story is not going to do The Bride!’s press run any favors.
On the latest episode of the Smartless podcast, Gyllenhaal was describing her husband’s many outdoorsman activities — “he raises bees and chickens and taps maple trees and has a beautiful garden” — but before anyone started thinking of Sarsgaard as some kind of thespian Jamie Fraser, Gyllenhaal reminded us he’s still only human. His Brooklyn-based hive, unfortunately, did not survive one particularly busy filming schedule.
“All of his bees in Brooklyn died,” Gyllenhaal told hosts Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes. “And it was because he made a mistake. He made a beekeeping mistake. And he was so upset about it.” She recalled telling her husband to “give yourself a break” because he’d been filming back-to-back projects in Switzerland and London and was way too busy to take care of his bees. “Like, some people’s only job is doing bees, you know?” she added.
When Bateman pressed Gyllenhaal on whether she had shirked her responsibilities “in babysitting the bees” while her husband was out of town, she admitted, “Yeah, I think I maybe did,” and then added “you’re not wrong” when Bateman joked that Sarsgaard had left her a note with instructions to take care of them.
I can’t tell you who bears ultimate responsibility for the extinction of Peter Sarsgaard’s bees, only that if I ever need a celebrity pet-sitter in Brooklyn, I will be keeping this story in mind.
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