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“Extra” sat down with Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley to talk starring in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!”
Christian spoke about playing Frankenstein’s monster, who is dying of loneliness and decides to take a risk, setting him off on a roller-coaster ride with the Bride, played by Jessie.
Bale said Frank has lived with “sorrowful loneliness,” because of the guilt, remorse, and pain over “the terrible crimes he committed as this giant man child with the worst parent ever in history.”
Christian went on, “He can’t live like this any longer, you know, he’s gonna die of loneliness and he needs somebody. He needs some sort of a companion. And so, he takes that risk and he’d have been happy with a piece of bread or something that, you know, that would sit with him and maybe hold his hand occasionally and instead he gets this absolute insane…”
Jessie quipped, “Croissant!”
Christian continued, “There you go, this buttery croissant… who’s just the most lively, livewire, authentic, sharp, brilliant person that he could ever imagine and he’s barely hanging on, on this roller coaster ride that the two of them go on.”
Jessie reflected on taking on three characters, noting it was “a trip” to live with those different voices.
As for taking on the roles, she said, “I’m a bit of a magpie. Like, I just need to kind of open my eyes and whatever instinctively feels delicious be like, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting texture. That’s an interesting texture.’ And then put it into a big pot of soup and hope that in some way it’ll come out and be fun to play.”
Buckley went on, “It was a trip to live with kind of these three voices inside me but that were essential for this character for the Bride to discover herself in her totality.”
Christian and Jessie also both talked about the chaos or “monster” that lives inside everyone.
Bale said, “I love all those thoughts anyway. I enjoy having all those thoughts… And I think it’s also essential, isn’t it? You know, because life becomes a total farce. It becomes a performance if all you’re doing is accepting the sort of order and the performative nature of being eternally optimistic and being a ‘good person’ which ultimately ends up with just being a bored person who’s not living life properly anyway instead of accepting that everyone’s got chaos to them and this sort of need for the, you know, Dionysus within them and so that’s what they embrace.”
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Jessie added, “Even if you try to repress the monster, it comes out like if you’re just living a mundane life, there’s just, like, little valves… that’s where monstrosity comes from.”
Buckley recalled, “In Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’ you know, he’s a beautiful creature that’s made from the broken bits of humanity that’s locked into an attic. And it’s his loneliness that creates his maliciousness. He says, ‘I’m malicious because I’m miserable.’”
Meanwhile, Jessie has been sweeping award season for her role in “Hamnet.”
But it turns out she was actually turned down by two drama schools at the start of her career.
She insisted, “I think they were absolutely right to turn me down, by the way… I wasn’t ready and I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I was young and I needed to go live life.”
Buckley continued, “For young people I would say, ‘You got to go do lots of things. You know go work in a market, go work in a pub, go travel, you know, sleep with loads of people, get drunk on a Friday night like do it all. That’s where you learn to be a human.”