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.
Jessie Buckley's neck just snapped back, and everyone is holding their breath to see if she's okay.
It's two days after the Hamnet star won her first Golden Globe, but she's already shifting her attention to her next career-defining role: The Bride! There's no time to continue celebrating -- after a busy morning attending a screening of her titular turn in director Maggie Gyllenhaal's bold new take on the Bride of Frankenstein, the Irish actor is now putting her body on the line to get back in character for Entertainment Weekly's cover shoot.
As Gesaffelstein's dark techno banger "Opr" blasts over the speaker in Hollywood's Nya Studios, Buckley transforms into a corpse bride, eerily emerging from the shadows and fog while goth dancers demonically haunt her. But when her veil is ripped off from behind, everyone on set gasps as her head goes with it.
The move was meticulously planned, of course. But after the first attempt malfunctioned -- the lace caught on the bottom of Buckley's bouquet, resulting in the veil accidentally yanking her head back -- everyone is now on high alert.
The room sighs in relief a second later when Buckley reanimates, jerking and flailing like a soul possessed, grinning maniacally -- all on purpose, inspired by the earlier veil snafu. Buckley ends the take with more improvisation, rebelliously sticking out her tongue -- which she requested be colored black -- and smirking at the camera.
"I'm a mama!" Buckley, who welcomed a daughter last summer, reminds everyone with a laugh as she reviews the intense footage on the monitor a few minutes later, knowing she nailed the shot. And more importantly: she's (still) alive!
When talking to EW the next morning, Buckley raves over how much she loved contorting and throwing her body around on set -- even flinging her head back to near-dangerous angles. It reminded her that the Bride's untamed spirit is still inside her, despite finishing production on Gyllenhaal's punk-rock romance (in theaters March 6) a year and a half earlier.
"Any opportunity to just let your body go that way is so fun. As a woman, and especially post-birth, I want to be in that place more," Buckley, now the mother of a 6-month-old, says. "The female body is so full of expression, and it isn't something that's limited to just being objectified or to be appealing. 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."
Buckley dazzled audiences with her performance as Agnes, William Shakespeare's (Paul Mescal) grief-stricken wife, in Hamnet. And after earning her first-ever Golden Globe for the role, it's no surprise that she's leading the Oscar race as well. But what may come as a surprise is that she played a very different spouse first -- one more intimately connected with death.
Buckley stars opposite Christian Bale in Gyllenhaal's highly anticipated 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, streaked beehive hairdo and all -- the writer-director introduces a daring twist on the classic tale of Frankenstein's monster (Bale) seeking a companion.
"They think they know it, but they don't know it," says Bale, who reunites with Gyllenhaal nearly 20 years after starring together in The Dark Knight. He warns 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," she 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?"
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.
Dr. Euphronious obliges Frank's request, because she's "very moved by him," Bening says. "This is the dream come true for a scientist, to have him appear at the door."
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 original 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."
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 fighting injustices against women everywhere. 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."
Despite the reversed release order, Buckley filmed The Bride! before Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, showing up to the set of the historical drama just two weeks later -- with her eyebrows still bleached, no less. And if you think Buckley put on a career-best showing in that film, you haven't seen anything yet. She 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 felt "daunted" by the idea of playing three roles, each with different accents, personalities, and physicalities. Still, she impressed 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 says. "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."
Nearly unrecognizable as each woman, it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role(s). In fact, 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.'"
That said, it didn't take much for Gyllenhaal to cave on her rule.
"We drank too much wine," she admits with a laugh (relatable!). "And I said, 'I'm working on something. Do you want to just read it?' We read the opening sequence, pretty similar to how it is in the movie."
Buckley remembers feeling enthralled by that first scene -- which features both Shelley and the doomed woman who eventually becomes the Bride -- and even more so when Gyllenhaal finally sent her the completed script about a year later.
"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."
Gyllenhaal wanted Buckley as her star, and Buckley was up for the challenge. Sounds like a done deal, right? But just like the Bride's own crusade to champion women in need, Gyllenhaal had to wage war against wary studio executives. (Gyllenhaal doesn't name names, but clarifies that she originally developed the movie at Netflix, and that Warner Bros. Pictures co-chairs/CEOs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy "were 100 percent in my corner about Jessie from the very beginning.")
"She had to basically convince the powers that be that it didn't matter that I didn't have an Instagram account, that she only wanted me to do it," Buckley says. "And I'm very, very grateful -- it's not an easy thing to do. And I also get it on behalf of the studio. It'd be way easier if I had a million Instagram followers for them. But I don't think that actually works. At the end of the day, you want a story to have life, and whatever the director or writer feels is the way to make that come to life, that's their choice."
Buckley smiles as she admits, "I'm probably going to get in a lot of trouble for saying this. Maybe there was a moment where that actually had weight, and I just don't believe it does anymore. I think people like Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Chloé Zhao, Denis Villeneuve, they're just making their s---, doing it their way. I don't think they can make the movies that they've made if they chose an ingredient based on Instagram followers rather than what color paint they wanted to use."
Gyllenhaal was more than willing to rage against the machine to make sure Buckley got the gig.
"I've been an actress for many years, and I just was like, 'I'm going to bat for this girl. Who else is going to play her?'" she says. "When people did that for me, it changed my life, so I'm doing it. And it worked, and now she's going to win the Oscar, so I feel very vindicated."
Here comes... The Bride!
Lightning flashes. Electricity crackles. The lab table slowly lifts as energy surges through the Bride's body, and she breaks the chains restraining her wrists. But there's a problem with her resurrection. Like the Bride, who has imperfect, mismatched legs in the film, Buckley is struggling with her feet at the bottom of the wooden slab during EW's cover shoot. Or rather, it's her shoes.
"Something's wrong," she calls out before realizing the problem. "They're on the wrong feet!"
Buckley clearly knows how to use her voice when she needs to speak up, and not just for minor wardrobe issues. She was instrumental in developing the concept for this cover, enthusiastically brainstorming how to incorporate dancers into the shoot as an homage to the film's massive musical scenes (more on that later). It's yet another reason Gyllenhaal knows she chose the right person 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."
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."
While plot details are top secret as to why she was murdered, that mystery drives the Bride -- and Frank, who would happily follow her to hell and back with a smile on his scarred face, though he's keeping his own secrets -- throughout most of the film.
"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."
Buckley channels that energy now during EW's photo shoot. She picks up a wooden chair and, whipping it around her head, almost loses her grip. Thankfully, she saves it from flying into the crew member directing the wind machine at her long, bleached blonde wig.
"Stupid chair!" she yells.
Moments later, she sits in the same chair, posing against a mirrored table. While looking at the photos on a monitor after, she smiles when she notices that the warped reflection gave her a third eye: "It looks like I'm a monster."
Though Buckley's delighted to see herself as such, the Bride and Frank have more complicated feelings about their monstrous identities. Frank's insecurity about his humanity is what led him to isolate himself for so long before asking Dr. Euphronious to make him a bride as monstrous as he is. The Bride learns to view herself as a monster after a night of dancing at a club 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."
"I think people need an outlet for their rage," Sarsgaard agrees. "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."
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."
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."
It wouldn't be a Frankenstein story without violence, after all. And here's where The Bride! earns its "R" rating. As much as Frank tries to suppress his violent nature, he won't stand idly by while others try to hurt his Bride -- and many men try. But the Bride can stand up for herself, too. Buckley says her character just wants to live after coming back from death, but is forced to "bite back" when she's threatened. 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."
After Frank and the Bride's first date at the club turns into the honeymoon from hell, they embark on a cross-country reign of terror, leaving bodies in their wake. But you'll find yourself rooting 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."
But the filmmaker 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 adds. "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."
Gyllenhaal's entire vision of the classic Frankenstein tale couldn't be more different from another recent take. When she first began developing The Bride! at Netflix (before it ultimately landed at Warner Bros. for a theatrical release), she knew Guillermo del Toro was also making his Frankenstein (released in October 2025) at the streamer around the same time. But she never saw his film as competition.
"How cool that Guillermo del Toro and I just randomly, at the same moment, are thinking about somewhat similar things? And, as it turns out, in extremely different ways," she says. "When we were both at Netflix, I thought, 'Let's double-feature it.' I always thought we'll be the 10 p.m. showing to his 8 p.m. showing, no problem."
And if you think you don't need to see another Frankenstein story so soon, you'll be missing out. Because what del Toro's Frankenstein doesn't have? Huge musical numbers. Just don't call The Bride! a musical.
Dance 'til you're dead
"Can we just put to bed the thing about it being a musical?" Gyllenhaal declares. "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.
For the role of Hollywood matinee idol Ronnie Reed, the object of Frank's obsession, Gyllenhaal always wanted to ask her brother Jake to dust off his singing and dancing skills. But she waited a long time to discuss the role with him, wanting to ensure it was the "right thing" for their sibling relationship.
"When I realized it was, it was great," the writer-director says. "He's such an incredible singer, and I love hearing him sing. 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."
And Ronnie isn't the only one putting on the ritz; Frank ends up singing and dancing in multiple scenes, too. And this time, it's with someone who actually loves him back.
"You get to humiliate yourself in a really wonderful way," Bale says of filming the song-and-dance sequences with Buckley and Jake. "I love humiliating myself, and it was fantastically exhausting, but in a really ecstatic and joyful way."
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."
"Our first ever day of shooting was a ginormous tap dance sequence for seven hours," Buckley says with a laugh. "It was so wild and so fun. It was like, 'Okay, I think we've started!' It felt like running a marathon. At least twice a week, I had to go and get a massage because everything would just be sore."
One specific dance number (teased in the trailer) is the most ambitious scene in the film, according to Gyllenhaal, who still can't believe that she actually pulled it off.
"I had 200 extras dancing, really important acting -- the major things we need in order to tell the story [in that scene], there's like 150 of them," the filmmaker says. "My shot lists have 40 things on them per day. And because of Christian's makeup -- it took six hours because it was so subtle and real -- it meant that sequence that he was in a lot of, we'd have to get slowly pushed [later every day]. We're all kind of exhausted and euphoric at the same time. It was a weird way of working."
What helped Gyllenhaal make the chaotic, long, and stressful shoot days easier was having her entire family on set. Not only did she cast her husband and brother in major roles, but she also included her and Sarsgaard's two daughters, Ramona, 19, and Gloria, 13, in cameos.
"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."
Sarsgaard loved watching their daughters join the production.
"Everyone was in their comfort zone on some level, and Maggie makes it very comfortable," he says. "Jake doing what he does in this movie is what I've been waiting for him to do for a very long time. Of course, Maggie had done Batman with Christian, and I'd known Christian for 30 years. I'd done maybe three movies with Penelope before, so it felt more like a reunion, everybody coming together to do something really special."
They just had to ignore all the screaming on set. Or, even better, join in on it. Because it took so long to transform Bale into Frank every day (whereas Buckley says her own hair and makeup only took an hour and a half), he found a unique and fitting way to keep himself "from going insane" in the chair.
"I would scream like crazy, every day," he reveals. "Just to [release the] despair, all of that restraint that you have to display when you're sitting still for that long.... I didn't want to do it driving into work because I thought I might cause a crash. And I didn't want to do it by myself because I thought everyone would just think I'm going nuts."
Bale first enlisted his hair and makeup team to unleash a primal scream with him every day, which he says was a "great bonding experience." Soon enough, their group grew.
"Oh man, I'm telling you, the whole crew got involved by the end, because people would hear us screaming," he adds. "We would open the doors, and gradually, a bit like the Bride's revolution, a few people were going, 'Can we do it too?' And then by the end, there were like 30 people who would hear us and run to the makeup trailer to be a part of it and scream as well."
After all, there's nothing better than a scream to make you feel alive.
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Directed by Kristen Harding and Alison Wild
Photography by Gina Gizella Manning
Motion - DP: Maddie Leach; 1st AC: Kyle Summers; 2nd AC: Jonathan Maurer; Gaffer: Bailey Clark; Best Electric: Noah Shettel; SLT: Maile Edwards; Key Grip: Derek DiPippo; Best Grip: Phillip Sperry; Grip: Baele Alexander
Production Design - Production Designer: Ward Robinson/Wooden Ladder: PD Crew: Rene Ureno, Abi Linares, David Celaya
Photo - Lighting Director: Mike Pecci; Digital Tech: Dante Velasquez; Gaffer: James Swartz; Camera Assistant: Mike Tran; PA: Fernando Ponce
Production - Wardrobe Stylist: Alexis Asquith; Hair: Rachel Lita; Make Up Design: Pat McGrath Makeup Artist: Jordan Liberty using Pat McGrath Labs; Choreographer: Judson Emery; Dancer Styling: Devan Aischa; Dancers: Judson Emery, Devan Aischa, Sasha Mallory, Caitlin Fearrington, Augustine, Devin Waxman
Post-Production - Color Correction: Nate Seymour/TRAFIK; VFX: Derek Viramontes; Design: Alex Sandoval; Score: Hildur Guðnadóttir; Sound Design: Kristen Harding; Digital BTS: Briana Monet; BTS Editor: Jordan Moran
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