‘Pop and big and radical at the same time’: Maggie Gyllenhaal teases ‘The Bride’ at CinemaCon
Women love monster movies. Monster love stories are some of our favorite things to read and interact with. So it is no surprise that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride was born out of that love.
At CinemaCon, Gyllenhaal and her bride, Jessie Buckley, came to talk about the film and debut a trailer for it. But one of the best things that Gyllenhaal said when talking about the film was where she got the inspiration for it. She spoke about how after The Lost Daughter, she was looking for something new. She said she wanted something “pop and big” but she also wanted it to be “radical at the same time.”
Luckily, she saw someone with a tattoo of Frankenstein’s Monster and the Bride. It inspired her to think about the fact that in other adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Bride is either barely in it or is silent. So she wanted to change that.
The, as she said, punk love story brings us Buckley as the Bride to Christian Bale’s Monster. But what we saw in the trailer is a woman who is questioning so much about herself. She is reborn as the Monster’s bride and questions her own name, what she was like before, and how she was chosen as his bride.
Listen, I love a messy relationship and this film does feel, in a lot of ways, like that toxic couple you cannot help but watch. But Gyllenhaal’s vision for The Bride is the kind of punk that we’ve been missing for years but, as Gyllenhaal pointed out, it is incredibly unique as well. Or she said everyone she showed it to said they’ve never seen anything like it before.
A steam punk love story built in rage? I’m in
As someone who loves a good Christian Bale movie, the trailer we got for The Bride felt like something so different from his more recent work. Bale isn’t a “love story” kind of actor. He’s had love interests in movies but a tragic and toxic kind of love feels new for him. But Gyllenhaal has such a strong vision in The Bride that even if he was a romance king, I still think that this would feel completely unique.
Call it a love of the monster genre or what have you but I do love when we take a classic and do something a bit more fun with it. The Bride doesn’t feel like just another adaptation of Frankenstein. Instead, it feels like we’re getting to see something unique done with Shelley’s story.
Gyllenhaal’s film looks dark and explosive and if it means that we get to see some really cool punk looks in a Frankenstein story, so be it. But what their CinemaCon panel did was turn my excitement for this movie up to an 11.
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