Sydney Bucksbaum is a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly. She has been working at EW since 2019 and is a published author. Her work has previously appeared in TV Guide Magazine, E! News/E! Online, The Hollywood Reporter, Mashable, Bustle, IGN, DCComics.com, Inverse, The Daily Northwestern, and more.
Maggie Gyllenhaal made her new movie The Bride! a full family affair.
Not only did the writer-director cast her husband, Peter Sarsgaard, and brother, Jake, in major roles, but Entertainment Weekly can exclusively reveal that she also included her and Sarsgaard's two daughters, Ramona, 19 (pictured below), and Gloria, 13, in cameos as well.
"I just thought if they want to, come be in the movie!" Gyllenhaal says with a smile. "And they did. I love having them be in it. My little daughter -- she's 13 now, but she was 11 then -- is sitting on the bar at the end. And my other daughter was, for a long time, a really serious dancer, and so she's with the dancers."
Gyllenhaal reveals that Gloria had a friend while filming her cameo; her production designer Karen Murphy's daughter is also in the same scene.
The Bride! is Gyllenhaal's second film (following her 2021 directorial debut, The Lost Daughter). Inspired by James Whale's 1935 horror The Bride of Frankenstein -- or, more specifically, a tattoo that Gyllenhaal once saw on a stranger's arm of Elsa Lanchester's iconic version of the character -- the writer-director introduces a daring twist on the classic tale of Frankenstein's monster (Christian Bale) seeking a companion. This time, the woman's corpse, who becomes the Bride (Jessie Buckley), not only comes alive, but she also sparks a cultural revolution as she and "Frank" become outlaw lovers on a crime spree that would terrify even Bonnie and Clyde.
Gyllenhaal's "punk" take on the classic monster tale is all about celebrating characters who don't fit into boxes -- or just simply don't fit in at all. She's proud of how her two daughters fit that description in beautiful ways, which is why she's happy she was able to include them in the movie.
"They don't fit in their boxes, and they were really the inspiration for making the movie," Gyllenhaal says.
Sarsgaard was also thrilled to see their daughters working hard on set during filming. "At school, they make things and stuff like that, and they do theater, but they haven't expressed a lot of interest in being in our business," Sarsgaard tells EW with a smirk before quipping, "I wonder why."
And even though his wife didn't cast him in the role of Detective Wiles until "later" in the development process, Sarsgaard wasn't too worried.
"I guess I generally assume I'll be in her thing somewhere," he says with another smile. "I really enjoy working with people I'm close with -- I've worked with Maggie many, many times, my brother-in-law many, many times, even my mother-in-law directed me in a movie, so I'm obviously available to the people closest to me."
But it was more than just a family favor for Sarsgaard when it came to joining the cast of The Bride!. "With Maggie, she's just such an extraordinary talent that even if I were not married to her, I would be trying to get the part," he says. "We're all slightly different people at work than we are at home, so I would say that my wife probably prefers my home self to my work self -- I ask 'why' too many times at work. I'm a little tougher, maybe, at work. But that's also just a lot of experience in acting."
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For her part, Gyllenhaal doesn't mind Sarsgaard's work ethic one bit, because she's constantly impressed by the performances he delivers in her projects.
"I just think he's one of those brilliant actors," she gushes. "And he was always kind of a part of helping me think things through. It's just such a Peter way. I just really wanted him to be in the movie. Peter, in some ways, has made a career of taking very flawed, broken people and finding the humanity in them. I mean, he's done other things too, but he does that really well, and I wanted to see what he would do with Wiles."
And while it's rare to employ one's entire immediate family on a massive movie like this, Sarsgaard shrugs it off when asked what it was like having all his loved ones working on set. "It didn't seem like a big deal, to be honest," he says. "It had the feeling of a bunch of people coming together to do something really special."
See the whole Gyllenhaal-Sarsgaard clan when The Bride! hits theaters March 6. For more on the movie, read EW's cover story here.
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