“I watched the [1935] movie The Bride of Frankenstein and I didn’t know, but she’s only in it for two minutes and she doesn’t say one word,” recalls Maggie Gyllenhaal. “And it made me start to wonder, made me curious what is she thinking, after having been dug up from a grave and told she’s supposed to be marrying somebody that she doesn’t recognize? What’s on her mind?”
And so began The Bride!, Gyllenhaal’s second directorial feature that gives the Bride of Frankenstein her big moment. It’s set in 1930s Chicago where Frankenstein’s monster (who goes by Frank, played by Christian Bale) asks Annette Bening’s Dr. Euphronius to create a companion for him, as they bring to life a murdered young woman known as The Bride.
Jessie Buckley, likely just days away from winning an Oscar for her performance in Hamnet, stars in the role after she and Gyllenhaal worked together on 2021’s The Lost Daughter.
“She was so wonderful and also spoke my language in a way that I’ve never encountered in quite the same way,” Gyllenhaal said of the star at the film‘s New York premiere on Tuesday. “I also like working with actors who speak another language, it’s also very exciting, [but] Jessie and I are real soul sisters and artistic sisters, and have been for a long time.”
The filmmaker also explained how she wanted her Bride and Frankenstein to look, breaking with the visuals from past adaptations. In creating Buckley’s look, “We knew that it had to be iconic, and at the same time I wanted it to be very real and very human. She wears one dress for the entire movie — that dress, how do you sweat in it, how do you live in it? And get stains and get torn and ripped.”
Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley in ‘The Bride!‘
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Gyllenhaal continued, “The same was true for Christian, I wanted him to be scary like a monster but very real. And I think it’s more upsetting to see a face that looks like it actually could have been sewn together — the neck sewn onto the face and then something that looks like a Halloween mask. So we wanted it to be that almost graphic novel iconic vibe mixed with the very, very real.”
Bale, who previously worked with Gyllenhaal on screen in The Dark Knight, said when she first sent him the project, he thought “that she’d written one of the best, most radical, bold and just naughty scripts I’d read in so long. I couldn’t believe that a studio was going to put the amount of money into it.”
He went on to credit Warner Bros.’ Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy for supporting the project, as studios usually “make choices based on fear” and “they’re making choices based on bravery, based on genuine love of cinema, based on love of filmmakers as well and it’s really paying off for them. They’ve had just the most successful year and the two of them are really, really helping towards saving theatrical release movies and I’m so proud to have been a part of it.” Bale added, “Maggie’s just hit it out of the box, she’s a really fantastic director.”
The Bride! — which also stars Gyllenhaal’s husband Peter Sarsgaard and brother Jake, alongside Penélope Cruz, Julianne Hough and John Magar — hits theaters on Friday.
Irene Kim contributed to this report.