LOS ANGELES, March 6 (UPI) — Jessie Buckley stars in The Bride!, in theaters Friday, after her Oscar nominated turn in last year’s Hamnet. Buckley filmed The Bride! first and said her Hamnet character came out of her work on this movie.
At a recent virtual press conference, Buckley, 36, explained how the different roles connected. The Bride (Buckley) was resurrected to join Frankenstein (Christian Bale), and Hamnet‘s Agnes was Shakespeare’s wife grieving their child’s death.
“The woman that you discover at the beginning of Hamnet is the woman that I birthed in myself in Bride,” Buckley said. “I think in some ways when Agnes is able to let Will go, it’s because she has a substantial love and I think the love that I experienced and explored in The Bride!.”
Buckley described her Bride! character, Ida, as “a woman who has a language unto her own, is deeply embodied, is ready to love wildly and on their own terms, like really love.”
Ida does die and come back to life. Her face is stained with the chemicals Dr. Euphornius used to resurrect her, a look that only subsided gradually after filming.
“Yes, I came into fittings with bleached eyebrows and like an electrical current pulsing through me,” Buckley continued. “Over the two weeks, I had to distill all that really incredible energy right down and put my hands in the ground.
Even before she dies, Ida is possessed by the spirit of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. Buckley also plays Shelley, who speaks through Ida to tell the world her follow-up story.
Maggie Gyllenhaal wrote and directed The Bride!. She was inspired by Shelley after reading Frankenstein for the first time after graduating Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in literature and Eastern religions.
“I closed the last page of it and secretly, maybe dangerously, I thought, ‘I wonder if Mary Shelley had a bit more she wanted to say, that was not only unpublishable in 1820, but unthinkable,'” Gyllenhaal, 48, said. “What if we dared ourselves to fantasize or imagine what this radical woman, what else she might have had on her mind?”
Gyllenhaal said she felt a bit possessed by Shelley’s spirit herself.
“She just wouldn’t go away,” Gyllenhaal said. “I like to sometimes imagine that she is speaking through me. In my house, if like a door slams or like, you know, like a gust of wind comes through, we say, ‘Oh, it’s Mary Shelley.'”
In the novel, Victor Frankenstein creates a female at the demands of his creature but destroys her. That portion of the book provided the basis for the 1935 James Whale directed Bride of Frankenstein.
Still, Gyllenhaal felt The Bride was an extra in her own movie.
“The Bride isn’t in it,” Gyllenhaal said. “I mean, she’s in it for two minutes and she doesn’t say one word. It made me very curious about what she might be thinking or feeling.”
In the 1935 film, Elsa Lancaster played Shelley in a prologue and the Bride in the film. Buckley was inspired by Lancaster.
“What a great opportunity to like, give voice to something that wasn’t permitted or had that opportunity before,” Buckley said. “She doesn’t get reinvigorated with a definite idea of herself. She gets reinvigorated with huge questions, but something that’s deeply embodied.”
Gyllenhaal realized that giving women a voice was not limited to the Bride of Frankenstein in the history of cinema.
“Come to think of it actually, I think all sorts of women in movies made a long time ago, we don’t get a chance to get really inside of what was she thinking?” Gyllenhaal said. “She finds herself in such an insane situation, having been brought back from the dead without her consent to be the wife of someone that she’s never met.”
Buckley said Ida had her own curiosity about Frankenstein that made her stay with him. Their interactions explored more than romantic love and monogamy for Buckley.
“She’s not screaming and saying no,” Buckley said. “How do we command real deep, dangerous love where all of who we are can be seen, and especially the monstrous?”
The bond between two so-called monsters was also important to Gyllenhaal.
“There sometimes feels like monstrous aspects inside of each and every one of us, things that we are told are not allowed,” Gyllenhaal said. “This movie is a celebration of all of the parts of all of us that will not fit into the box that we’ve been told we need to fit into.”
Buckley felt the Shelley of The Bride! realized what made her original creature monstrous and attempted to correct it with Ida.
“What makes this monster monstrous is loneliness,” Buckley said. “She’s like, ‘I need to give it love. I need love. I wasn’t brave enough. I was too scared to love the last time.'”
Buckley cherished the monster that allowed her to release the grieving mother in Hamnet later.
“What a gift to know both of these women inside me,” Buckley said. “I’m never going to let them go.”