Maggie Gyllenhaal on How ‘The Bride!’ Cracks Hollywood Fantasies Wide Open

“The Bride!” opens somewhere unknowable — a vignetted dark space in which the specter of Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) feels like she’s lit by her own unquenchable desire for mischief, and a version of the “Frankenstein” story she never got to tell. Director Maggie Gyllenhaal readily admits that the idea that Shelley left some piece of the story unarticulated is a fantasy of hers. “The Bride!” embraces not only Gyllenhaal’s desire to give Shelley more to say in a more modern context, but it also embraces almost every other kind of fantasy Hollywood films have to offer, in order to try to break them apart and find some messy emotional reality beneath. 

The film features cheeky references to Ginger Rogers and Myrna Loy, and fully transports Frankenstein’s Monster, aka Frank (Christian Bale) and The Bride (also Jessie Buckley) into 1930s musical worlds bursting with chorus lines, Busby Berkeley–approved God’s eye shots, and a charismatic dance man named Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal) delightedly hoofing it to Annette Hanshaw numbers. Gyllenhaal told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast that the setting for “The Bride!” and Frank’s fixation with the movies comes from the same storytelling impulse. 

“I wanted Frank’s primary relationship to be with a movie star because he’s so alienated and he’s so alone, and that kind of relationship is totally one-sided. He feels a deep emotional connection with this guy who doesn’t know him. So [the film had] to be set in an era where there are movies,” Gyllenhaal said. From that premise, Gyllenhaal lighted on 1930s movie musicals as some of the glossiest and most charming fantasies that Hollywood has ever put out, but also as some of the most consciously artificial. 

“[1930s musicals] are so joyful and so delightful, but they are totally and utterly based in fantasy. And this movie is the opposite of that. This movie is about the cracking open of that fantasy and acknowledging the whole heart, the whole person, monstrousness and all, in order to be able to love,” Gyllenhaal said. 

One of the most visual and playful ways that Gyllenhaal does this is by throwing Frank and The Bride into the musical worlds of Ronnie Reed. This required compositing “The Bride!” actors into actual pieces of 1930s film, with custom choreography to fit into those existing environments while moving with the more fourth-wall-breaking perspectives and rhythms of cutting “The Bride!” employs for those sequences. 

But from environments to costumes to The Bride’s legally distinct shock of white hair, Gyllenhaal wanted the entire design of “The Bride!” to be just as fantastical and impish as the ghost of Mary Shelley in her black-and-white perch.  “It’s the ‘30s by way of 1981, downtown New York,” Gyllenhaal said. “If it was too much 1930s, it didn’t feel correct. If it was too much 1981, it didn’t feel correct. If it was too much [of] right now, it didn’t feel correct. It’s a kind of combination of all of those things in an imaginary place.” 

‘The Bride!’ ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Gyllenhaal and her team wanted the film world to feel as unbound in its design as a stylized graphic novel, with iconic, eye-popping character design; the magic trick would be to make that space feel mixed in with something very, very real.

“If she’s in one orange dress, like she could be drawn in a graphic novel in that dress for the entire story, at a certain point, it also has to have sweat stains in the armpits and rips where there would be rips and runs in her stockings and marks and blood. All of it had to feel really, really human and lived-in, right alongside the iconic,” Gyllenhaal said. 

It was important to Gyllenhaal to mix the iconic and a grounded emotional reality, to play with different modes of storytelling, and to have neither Buckley’s The Bride nor “The Bride!” the movie fit into a neat set of boxes. The boxes, in fact, may be part of why so many stories fall so flat in 2026.

“I’m not really interested in making a movie that fits clearly into one genre. We’ve had so many of those, you know? Also, it was a language that was made by other people with a different experience than mine, and I feel like, if I have very clear and specific intentions, why not use aspects of all the genres, if they’re useful to me?” Gyllenhaal said. “I think we’re kind of in post-genre times.”   

“The Bride!” is now in theaters from Warner Bros. Pictures. Listen to the full Filmmaker Toolkit interview above or on your preferred podcast platform.