See ‘The Bride!’ star Jessie Buckley come alive in EW’s cover shoot photos (exclusive)

Here comes … The Bride!

After winning her first Golden Globe and earning her first Oscar nomination for her performance in Hamnet, Buckley is already shifting her attention to her next career-defining role: The Bride! Despite the reversed release order, Buckley filmed Gyllenhaal’s monster flick before Chloé Zhao’s historical drama — she even showed up to the set of Shakespeare film just two weeks later with her eyebrows still bleached. And if you think Buckley put on a career-best showing in that film, you haven’t seen anything yet.

„The female body is so full of expression, and it isn’t something that’s limited to just being objectified or to be appealing,“ Buckley says. „It’s something that’s way more expansive and wild and curious. Since I’ve been in that experience with The Bride! — and with Hamnet — I just don’t want anything else now.“

She’s aliiiiive

Buckley now pulls triple duty in The Bride!, losing herself in each of her three roles: Mary Shelley, the original author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, speaking from beyond the grave; Ida, a young woman murdered by low-level mobsters; and her reanimated, amnesiac corpse, pale and stained with black splotches, who ultimately names herself the Bride. 

Buckley says she felt „daunted“ by the idea of playing three roles, each with different accents, personalities, and physicalities. Still, she impressed her costar Bale every day with how easy she made it look. „You recognize when there’s the arrival of a person who is not business as usual,“ he tells EW. „What she does is very serious, and in many ways sacred, but it’s also bloody ridiculous and hilarious and raw and profane. It’s everything that you want in a storyteller.“

The monster under the bed

„They think they know it, but they don’t know it,“ Bale says of the movie, which reunites him with Gyllenhaal nearly 20 years after starring together in The Dark Knight. He says that the iconoclastic movie, set in the 1930s, is more of a dark love story than horror audiences may expect, which only added to its appeal for him: „It’s a great, kick-ass, bold, original film. This is real cinema.“

Bale’s iteration of the character (portrayed by Boris Karloff in the classic Universal films) has named himself Frank, after the „father“ who created him. Gyllenhaal already knows this will piss off some traditional literary fanatics, as will other changes in her fantasy reimagining of the beloved monster tale. „People give me a hard time about not calling him ‘Frankenstein’s monster,’ but he just would never call himself that,“ the filmmaker argues. „It’s not entirely inaccurate to say that Frankenstein is his father’s name. It’s so sad to me that he calls Dr. Frankenstein his father, but isn’t that so human and real?“

Mad science

Desperate for connection after a century of isolation, Frank travels to Chicago to ask mad scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to make him an undead bride. „I sort of imagined he’s been sitting in the woods, sticking a knife in his head and crying his eyes out, and he just wants someone who will sit quietly on a log with him for the rest of his life,“ Bale says.

And Dr. Euphronious obliges Frank’s request, because she’s „very moved by him,“ Bening tells EW. „This is the dream come true for a scientist, to have him appear at the door.“

Electric love

Frank and Dr. Euphronious dig up a woman’s corpse to create something more significant than the silent, failed experiment that only appears in roughly three minutes at the end of the 1935 movie. As this new Bride comes to life, her passion, curiosity, and disinhibition captivate Frank. „What he gets is pure electricity on a mission from God — and that’s also a good description of Jessie,“ Bale says. „He thought he was alive, but he realizes after meeting her that he was just breathing.“ 

Love game

As the two self-proclaimed monsters fall in love, they unintentionally embark on a crime spree that would shock even Bonnie and Clyde, and ignite a cultural revolution along the way. To say their romance is a violent, wild ride would be an understatement, and Buckley and Bale matched each other’s energy bringing that to life on set.

„We were both intense,“ Buckley says with a laugh. „We both were two greyhounds that were just let out of their kennels, and it was really, really thrilling. It was really probably the most intense, exhausting shoot of my life, but it was so fun.“

Her muse

Buckley was always Gyllenhaal’s first choice to star in The Bride!, after the two met while working together on The Lost Daughter. But when they reunited in Paris for dinner while Gyllenhaal was starting to write the script for The Bride!, the filmmaker never intended to let Buckley in on that secret. At least, not yet.

„I really tried not to write [the parts] for her,“ Gyllenhaal says. „I’ve had the experience as an actress of someone telling me, ‘I’m writing this for you,’ and then they didn’t offer it to me. And I thought, ‘Well, who knows? What if the Bride ends up having to be 75 or something? I can’t speak to her about it.'“

It didn’t take long for Gyllenhaal to cave on her rule and show Buckley what she’d been working on. „We drank too much wine,“ she admits with a laugh (relatable!). „We read the opening sequence, pretty similar to how it is in the movie.“

The proposal

After reading Gyllenhaal’s script, Buckley was both thrilled and scared about starring in the massive project.

„It was extraordinary. It was literally like something electrical in my hands,“ Buckley says. „I really had no idea how to do it, which is always an exciting place to want to do something in. You couldn’t help but be terrified.“

Speak up

Gyllenhaal wrote the script to give voice to a character who was, ironically, silent in the original film.

„The movie’s called The Bride of Frankenstein, but she’s not really in it. It’s just a Frankenstein sequel, and she literally doesn’t speak,“ Gyllenhaal says. „But without words, when she wakes up, she communicates ‘no f—ing way.’ She says ‘no’ to him. That’s certainly unusual now, and it must have been unusual then.“

Finding her voice

Because Gyllenhaal felt that the Bride „wasn’t given enough space“ to explore her own identity and agency before she was destroyed in the 1935 movie, she set out to tell a story that’s „exactly the opposite.“ This Bride comes alive for the majority of the story, is the main character, and not only speaks, but also has no filter, isn’t restrained by societal norms, and, most of all, is egged on by Shelley’s own „doesn’t give a f—“ spirit to speak for all women, dead or alive.

„It’s someone who has so much to say, has been so shut up,“ Gyllenhaal says. „What happens if you try to keep your hand on a geyser? When it finally explodes, it’s going to explode with triple the energy, and that is what happens to her.“

The circle of life (or death)

The dead body that Frank and Dr. Euphronious used to make the Bride came from a woman who was murdered. While plot details are top secret as to why she was killed, that mystery drives the Bride throughout most of the film — as well as Frank, who would happily follow her to hell and back with a smile on his scarred face, though he’s keeping his own secrets.

„It’s a soul who’s been born again and given a second chance,“ Bale says of the Bride. „And is making up for that lost time with a real vengeance of creativity, and destruction, and love, and violence, and intelligence, and stupidity, and burning the f—ing house down with it.“

Bridezilla

The Bride learns to see herself as a monster after a night of dancing at a club with Frank ends in violence, forcing the couple to hit the road where they’re tailed by a detective (played by Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard), and his brilliant but long-suffering secretary (Penélope Cruz). 

„The thing that was on my mind at the time was this idea of the monstrous — the monstrous outside us, but also the monstrous inside us,“ Gyllenhaal says. „I believe that we all have aspects of us that are actually monstrous, and not just dark, but like really f—ed up, as though it’s so terrifying you spend your life running from it. But if you turn around and look at it, shake hands with it, what happens? That’s pretty universal, and I do think it’s something on everyone’s mind right now.“

True romance

„I root for it, not just because my wife made it,“ Sarsgaard says of the big-budget, female-directed film. „But because I think people need an outlet for their rage. It’s a very interesting first date movie, right? Kind of a litmus test. It’ll inspire some people to be their own wildest selves and dance in the fountain in their underwear at night.“

Monster mash

While Frank and the Bride are quite literally monsters, in that they’re creatures brought back from the dead, the film also explores that theme on a figurative level. 

„They’re monsters in the way that every single one of us is able to be a monster,“ Bale says. „And it’s an equally violent love.“

The living dead

Gyllenhaal teases that „there are characters in the movie that are way more monstrous and are purely human, who haven’t been brought back from the dead. I’m more interested in that aspect of the monstrous than…. Well, I also am very interested in the biting people’s tongues out and smashing their heads against the wall.“

Violent streak

It wouldn’t be a Frankenstein story without violence, after all. Buckley says her character just wants to live after coming back from death, but is forced to „bite back“ when she’s threatened by violent men. Soon, she decides to do so for all women who have suffered before her. 

Tackling that particular part of the story is what scared Buckley most, because she felt a „responsibility“ that was bigger than herself. 

„There’s an insidious nature to an establishment that can continue to be violent towards not just women, but to everyone, and they seem to get away with it,“ Buckley says. „She’s calling it out. She’s creating a revolution to speak out against the establishment that is getting away with murder. It was saying the thing out loud. You can see in my body, I was shaking from the truth of it all.“

Honeymoon’s over

Frank and the Bride’s first date at the club turns into the honeymoon from hell as they embark on a cross-country reign of terror, leaving bodies in their wake. But you’ll root for Frank and the Bride despite the bloody havoc they wreak, because of what causes them to become violent in the first place.

„Most of us have felt really overwhelming rage,“ Gyllenhaal says. „I’m kind of interested in violence, as you can tell in the movie. I’m surprised sometimes by the response — people are like, ‘It’s a lot.’ Same with the sexual violence. I felt strongly that the sexual violence had to be brutal, real, because if you gloss over it, it doesn’t feel like the brutality that it is. And I got taken to task on that, too.“

Everything happens for a reason

Gyllenhaal promises that „not one bit of the sexual violence in the movie is unconsidered or gratuitous.“ 

„I am totally taking responsibility for my take on all of that,“ she says. „And I think that it is honoring people who have gone through things like that by making it feel horrible, brutal, massive, and really difficult to watch. That’s my take, and it might be different if a man were making the movie.“

Puttin’ on the Ritz

„Can we just put to bed the thing about it being a musical?“ Gyllenhaal declares about her film. „It is not a musical at all. That’s a different form. I don’t know why that keeps coming up.“

The Bride! may not be a musical, but it has its fair share of big-budget musical sequences. In his isolation, Frank became obsessed with movie musicals — sitting in dark theaters was the only time he felt safe around other people, since they couldn’t see his face. As a result, he developed a parasocial relationship with a particular glamorous movie star, Ronnie Reed (played by Gyllenhaal’s brother, Jake).

„He’s such an incredible singer, and I love hearing him sing,“ the filmmaker says. „If you sit through all the credits, at the very end is one of his beautiful songs he sings. That was really a live, exciting connection, working with him on set.“

Center stage

Bale and Buckley spent about a month before filming working with a choreographer on all the dance scenes, which Buckley says are like „a hybrid of Gaga dancing and tap dancing.“

„It felt like running a marathon,“ she adds. „At least twice a week, I had to go and get a massage because everything would just be sore.“

„You get to humiliate yourself in a really wonderful way,“ Bale says of filming the song-and-dance sequences. „I love humiliating myself, and it was fantastically exhausting, but in a really ecstatic and joyful way.“

She’s created a monster

Bening is still shocked at what Gyllenhaal pulled off with The Bride!

„It’s this huge vision that Maggie has, of the entire story and the way it looks and the music and the dancing and just the size of it and the outrageousness of it,“ Bening says. „I just was blown away. It’s full of feeling, and with all of the pyrotechnics going on and all of the visuals and the music and the stuff that happens, at the core of it, there’s just a lot of heart and soul and heartbreak.“

It’s not your average monster movie.