The actors also reveal the artists and actors who inspired their performances in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s genre-bending monster movie.

Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale break down their extensive transformations for The Bride

The actors also reveal the artists and actors who inspired their performances in Maggie Gyllenhaal's genre-bending monster movie.

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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March 6, 2026 5:52 p.m. ET

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Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale in 'The Bride'. Credit:

Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.

- Christian Bale's prosthetics for *The Bride* took up to six hours to apply in the makeup chair, while Jessie Buckley's took around 90 minutes.

- Buckley's performances in the film were inspired by Maggi Hambling and Barbara Stanwyck.

- Bale wanted his version of Frank to use Boris Karloff's turn as Frankenstein's monster as "the template."

It takes a lot to build a convincing movie monster. Just ask Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale.

The two actors play the Bride and Frank (formerly known as Frankenstein's monster), respectively, in Maggie Gyllenhaal's *The Bride*. Both performers undertook massive physical transformations to portray their reanimated characters — Buckley sports a platinum blonde hairdo, bleached eyebrows, and an inky face tattoo stretching from her lips to her left cheek, while Bale dons heavy prosthetics to create a gnarlier take on the patchwork, stapled-together aesthetic of Mary Shelley's creature.

Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley in 'The Bride'.

Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.

Bale's time in the makeup chair was significantly longer than Buckley's — up to six hours for the most elaborate prosthetics. "I had a great team," he tells **. "It requires a great deal of stillness. And so at the end of it, we all just screamed. We all did it every day. We would scream like crazy just to [release the] despair, all of that restraint that you have to display when you're sitting still for that long. They were such a great team, and I have such fond memories of them all."

The process for Buckley, on the other hand, only took around 90 minutes. "I think we got it down to an hour and a half," she says. "Compared to Christian, who I think had four, five, six hours of prosthetics every morning, we got it down, so it was okay."

Jessie Buckley in 'The Bride'.

The Oscar-nominated actress — who also plays *Frankenstein* author Mary Shelley as well as Ida, the woman whose body eventually becomes the Bride — drew from multiple inspirations while crafting her characters.

"For Mary Shelley, there's an artist in the U.K. called Maggi Hambling, who I've always loved, and she's like this untethered, fabulous artist with wild hair who will never be pictured without a cigarette in her hand," Buckley explained. "She just felt so interesting to use as a texture of who Mary Shelley might be in her voice. And so I had lots of images of her around when I was making her."

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The actress turned to Old Hollywood as she shaped her other performances. "Because it was set in 1930s, and Ida and the Bride are survivalists," Buckley says that she tried to evoke "that snappy 1930s kind of talky star" in her voice and mannerisms. "A Barbara Stanwyck-like trajectory laser beam — it comes from a place of deep survival in order to move in the world. And so you start building it with that and then finding the physicality of Mary and the physicality of Bride."

Buckley sought to have her characters fully formed by the time the cameras started rolling. "I like to do as much deep dive as I can so that when I get to set, I take my hands off the wheel and I don't want to be thinking about it at all," she says. "I stayed in the Bride's accent throughout filming, and I just wanted to let go because you're also standing opposite the titan that is Christian Bale. And if you're going to meet that energy, you've got to be pretty full."

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Bale wanted his version of Frank to exist in conversation with Boris Karloff's take on Frankenstein's monster, who debuted in James Whale's 1931 film *Frankenstein*.

Christian Bale in 'The Bride'.

"I couldn't accept it without us using Karloff as the template," he says. "In my mind, I wanted to represent Frank as someone who perhaps Mary Shelley had heard talk of and written a book roughly guessing at who this real person might be."

He continues, "These erroneous reports of 'he's eight foot,' 'he's got a flat head' were obviously not included in Shelley's book, but they are in James Whale's and Karloff's vision. And that's the vision that everybody thinks of. So I focused on that iconic portrayal and imagined that Frank had a copy of Shelley's book, liked to read through it, angered at what was wrong, recognizing what was right, and has lived through all these many years."

*The Bride* is now playing in theaters. For more on the movie, read EW's cover story here.

*Reporting by Sydney Bucksbaum.*

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