Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros.Save this storySave this story
In The Scenario, reporter Kirbie Johnson takes readers behind the scenes of the buzziest movies and TV shows to reveal how the best wigs, special effects makeup, and more are created. For this edition, Johnson spoke with Maggie Gyllenhaal, the director of The Bride!, about how she interpreted the character's original 1935 look for the modern(ish) day.
Monsters are so back, baby: between last year’s Guillermo del Toro-directed Frankenstein; 2024’s Nosferatu, Dracula, which quietly opened this February, and The Vampire Lestat series coming this June, the masses want monsters.
Now, here comes The Bride!, director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s modern-ish retelling of The Bride of Frankenstein. The Borris Karloff film from 1935 used the titular character’s now-iconic image—elongated hair with puffed-up finger waves, white lightning streaks, and a black lip—to sell the film. But, ironically, she’s only in it for two minutes and doesn’t speak, proof that a strong image can endure. “It's really her look and her spirit that have captured the cultural imagination,” Gyllenhaal told me during our conversation prior to the film’s release.
The Bride! is a story narrated by the late Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, who possesses the body of a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) to tell the stories of a crime boss who committed atrocities against women. This possession ultimately gets Ida killed, but she’s revived after death via electricity by Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Benning) at the pleas of Frank (né Frankenstein, played by Christian Bale).
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Gyllenhaal’s iteration of the bride differs from the original in a variety of ways, namely that she’s actually leading the movie and gets to speak this time. She also had to have an iconic look all her own: bleached out hair, singed eyebrows and white lashes, black bile she literally projectiles onto her face, body, and tongue, leaving stains. “At the same time, it was important to me that she be very real,” Gyllenhall says. “Along with the iconography, there was real truth. [Ida is in] one dress for the entire movie: it gets stained and ripped and sweat in—then we can relate to her and we can relate to [her] wild experience.”
Ida’s look does include some nods to the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, like the electricity-bleached hair, which mirrors those original white streaks, as well as the finger waves and the black lips. But it couldn’t be an exact replication; it needed to make sense for Ida’s story. “What would happen if she were electrocuted?” says Gyllenhaal. “[Her hair] would turn white: all the hair on her body, eyelashes, eyebrows—all of it white.”
Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images
The ink splatters on her face alongside the body and tongue stains are meant to emulate the black toxic substance used to resurrect her, which is literally leaking out of her. It’s also a symbol, Gyllenhaal says, of Ida reclaiming her voice. “Ida, before she’s reinvigorated, is so silenced. She isn't able to say the things she needs to say and isn't able to call out the monsters around her,” Gyllenhaal says. “In a way, when she coughs up this black stuff out of her throat, it's a way of opening up her space for her voice.”
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Gyllenhaal partnered with Oscar award-winning makeup and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey to create the look for Buckley and design the prosthetics for the film. Stacey shared on Instagram that the ink splat on Ida’s face was inspired by a Ralph Steadman portrait of American writer Hunter S. Thompson; instead of hand-painting it with makeup, it was created with temporary tattoos custom-made by special effects house Autonomous F/X, likely to help keep the splatter’s continuity throughout the film. Stacey did, however, freehand the body drips using Mehron paint; she wrote that she was inspired by a Man Ray photograph from the 1920s.
“Maggie and I wanted to show that ink had been pumped into her veins and had spilled out, which is why it drips down her body,” Stacey said in her Instagram caption. “[I wanted the mouth] to look like she had coughed and the ink had splashed up her face and stained her.” Stacey bleached Buckley’s eyebrows and had to follow the continuity of drawn-on and faded brows throughout the shoot. “I definitely wanted to add a punk element to the whole aesthetic.”
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros.
It’s also intentional that Frank himself isn’t following the typical design we’ve seen repeated in past adaptations. “Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—I think—asks us to look at the monsters inside of ourselves,” Gyllenhaal says. She points out the emotional complexities of Frankenstein’s monster from the novel; he has human characteristics, like intelligence and vulnerability; he experiences loneliness and abandonment. But he also does truly monstrous things, like killing innocent women and children. “At one point, he says, ‘I'm malicious because I'm miserable,’” Gyllenhaal says.
She says that giving Frank a normal skin tone instead of green encourages the audience to consider and own the monstrous parts of themselves instead of watching it play out with a mythical monster that isn’t rooted in reality. “It’s way more disturbing and scary to have Frank look like someone who actually was sewn together than someone who's in a Halloween mask,” she says.
