For Christian Bale, the appeal of art is not in success, but in risk. “I love failures,” confesses the British actor when presenting ‘The Bride!’, a film in which he takes on the challenge of reinterpreting the mythical Frankenstein’ s monster in the 1930s.
“It’s such an iconic role (…) a lot of people might be completely disappointed to compare it to Boris Karloff. You’re also up against the expectations that everyone has of Mary Shelley’s novel, so there’s a lot of risk of failure. But I love failures; talking about them is much more interesting than talking about triumphs,” says Bale in an interview with EFE.
In the vision of director Maggie Gyllenhaal, which opens this Thursday in Latin America and Friday in Spain and the United States, Frank, the creature created by Victor Frankenstein in Shelley’s book, has been wandering in solitude for over a hundred years until, with the help of Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), he brings a murdered young woman back to life.
Thus is born The Bride, played by Jessie Buckley, a defiant creature willing to question norms about being a woman, loving and seeking justice.
Gyllenhaal’s story focuses on Frank’s partner, which allowed Bale to explore new aspects of his character with greater freedom.
His Frank absorbed the gender roles of classic Hollywood movies: he aspires to be a gentleman and expects women to act like ladies, while he wanders alone in a world that rejects him.
“His father, Victor Frankenstein, was the worst father in the world, he taught him nothing, he abandoned him. He knows nothing about people and The Bride, on the other hand, knows too much about men. When they meet, he has a shocking revelation about how women really are and how brilliant this woman is,” explains Bale.
Although he is known for his drastic physical transformations in films such as ‘American Psycho’ and ‘The Machinist’, Bale says that in ‘The Bride!’ this was only part of the overall challenge.
“First I read the story and ask myself: is it a story I want to see? Is it a story that I can’t stop thinking about? If the answer is yes, then I start to realize what needs to be done,” he relates.
Unlike other transformations this challenge he shares with makeup artists who managed to create an inspired Frank with echoes of Sex Pistols punk Sid Vicious and his rendition of 1978’s ‘My Way’. “But that really required a team of people who were just as responsible for creating Frank as I was,” he adds.
Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley on The Bride!
Jessie Buckley brings three characters to life in one performance: Ida, the murdered young woman; The Bride, her resurrected rebel version; and Mary Shelley, who inhabits her as a critical conscience.
“I had this secret fantasy that maybe Mary Shelley had other things she wanted to say, and I wanted to imagine what they were and give her the space to say them,” Gyllenhaal tells EFE.
In his novel, Shelley does not show a bride for the creature, although the creature does ask for a companion, and in the 1935 film ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’, Elsa Lanchester is not the real protagonist of the story. Therefore, Buckley’s version delves deeper into the identity of this character.
“What I loved about this story is that it’s about a woman who is discovering herself, her mind, her body and her life force, within a relationship filled with love. This is not a black and white thing. It’s not about men versus women. This is about love,” says Buckley.
Frank and The Bride will star in an intense love affair marked by confusion, freedom, fear and rejection that, as they uncover cases of abuse, will turn them into symbols of a feminist revolution, but also into criminals persecuted by the law, reported Agencia EFE.
Here you can watch the trailer of the movie ‘The Bride’.
Find out more at ‘QueOnnda.com’.