Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight.

But as film fans know, it's a role that Katie Holmes took on in Batman Begins. As Gyllenhaal recently told The Los Angeles Times, though, that she was committed from the beginning to making the character her own.

"When [director and co-writer] Chris Nolan gave me the script, he said, 'She's not quite finished yet,'" Gyllenhaal said of the character. "So I read it, and I had a lot of ideas about ways that I thought that she could be stronger. And he was very open and collaborative and interested. In that first preliminary conversation, a lot of things that we talked about ended up in the movie.

It was really trying to find a way that I was absolutely in love with Harvey Dent and absolutely in love with Bruce Wayne, the ways I found them both honorable, ethical, moral men and the ways that I had problems with their ethics and morals."