Christian Bale is opening up about the emotional depth behind his character in The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s reimagining of the classic monster story.
During our cast interview, Bale told Blavity’s Shadow and Act that what drew him to the film was its originality.
“That’s what everybody wants. You just want something that’s original, something that people don’t feel like they’ve ever seen before,” Bale said.
Christian Bale on how Frank and the Bride approach love
Bale explained that his character, Frank (aka Frankenstein) and The Bride (Jessie Buckley) come to love from completely different life experiences.
He explained, “Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, he has a very, on the one hand, a healthy relationship in terms of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). The matinee idol provides a sense of not being alone in the world. However, he puts too much stake into that without any experience with real people. Somewhat like incels nowadays. The Bride is the opposite. She’s had too much experience with men. She’s been used in a way that it has become absolutely meaningless. And so they’re coming at love from a very different point of view, but both with wide open eyes of children who have been reborn and been given a second chance.”
He added that the Bride ultimately changes his character’s understanding of life itself.
“And so she presents to him a version of not just love, but life in general, an approach to it and a love of reinvention and of rebirth and gives him the license not to eternally feel complete guilt and regret over what he did, but instead to still find something that’s good in him that he can live for and feel truly alive,” he said.
On building the character’s internal history
Bale also discussed the extensive preparation he did to shape the character’s internal world, even beyond what appears on screen.
“I mean, [for] myself, the notion is that you just do way too much thinking about it, way too much preparation, but hopefully that can pay off in some degree in the movie, that you get a sense of there being a larger life off camera. And so for me, yeah, absolutely. I went through all sorts of things of what happened in Prussia and what happened in the pogroms and where he might have gone to and [a] leper colony and things and wars he might have gotten involved in, and was he in the middle of the American Civil War and stuff. But the essential thing that the audience needs to know is just that no matter what he’s done, he’s intensely lonely and he’s full of regret and he probably is literally cutting himself. He’s got all these scars, but I think some of them are self-inflicted as well, because of self-loathing, but also a need to try to still feel alive in some way. And then this film gives him an experience of being human that is more extreme than most humans ever experience in their lifetime.”
He also spoke about the character stepping into unfamiliar social spaces.
“But this search that begins with he’s going to arrive in the middle of people and he’s not accustomed to that. And so, sort of knowing how odd he looks and that people have never accepted him truly… arriving at Euphronius, Annette Bening’s character, as feeling like he must be a real eminent gentleman. He must speak a certain way. He’s worked out how to be. And then it is surprising to him that no, he doesn’t need any of that, not with this incredible creature of The Bride that they’ve invented.”
The Bride is in theaters March 6. Watch the full interview, also featuring Buckley and Maggie Gyllenhaal, above.
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