Minor SPOILERS are ahead for The Bride!, now playing in theaters.
Did you know The Bride! wasn’t always going to be part of the 2026 movie schedule? Maggie Gyllenhaal’s take on The Bride of Frankenstein was originally going to come out this past fall, until the release date was pushed back six months. When CinemaBlend spoke to the movie’s filmmaker, we ended up talking about one aspect of it that changed after her original cut was screened for audiences, and how it added to the final cut.
The Bride! opens up by declaring that its author, Mary Shelley, came up with the sci-fi classic Frankenstein “on a dare”. Then, the audience meets Shelley through Jessie Buckley’s narration and feral performance of the real person (alongside the actress playing The Bride). When I asked Gyllenhaal about opening up the movie in this fashion, she said this:
That was not originally in the movie. I showed the movie early on, and I got a lot of feedback that a bunch of people didn't know who Mary Shelley was, and that is fair enough. They just needed to know just who she was. And then all good, let's watch the movie. So I just clarified who she was, and then you can relax. You don't have to have majored in English or something.
It’s true. While Frankenstein is one of the most beloved science fiction books, these days it’s definitely more known as a pop culture touchstone in newer media across the past 200 years, like the line “It’s alive!” As Gyllenhaal continued:
I just made it very clear that's who she is, and she did write [Frankenstein] on a dare. I mean, maybe that's just my way of putting it, but it was a cold and stormy night and a group of writers in the early 19th century were sitting around a room and they thought ‘Who could write the scariest story?’ And she won.
Mary Shelley was just 18 when she crafted the idea of Frankenstein and 20 years old when the book was published. As a woman living in the 1800s, too, the act of her work getting out in the world at all was pretty radical. So, I know that I really appreciated the way her history was woven into the movie, even if it wasn’t initially part of The Bride!
Jessie Buckley also added what it was like to embody Mary Shelley in the movie with these words:
Being completely honest, the stuff that you see of Mary Shelley, I was eight months pregnant when we shot that, which was such a wild, incredible experience because I was like a monster. I had like two heartbeats inside me. I was on the precipice of creation myself. We were talking about what do we dare to offer to this woman, to your daughters, to our women out there to love, to life. And to be able to do that with this kind of creature in my belly while being untethered was delicious.
Buckley became pregnant this past year and welcomed her first baby, a girl, this past fall. The Bride’s principal photography took place in 2024. It’s made clear that the addition of all the Mary Shelley stuff in black and white was part of the rumored reshoots we had heard about after the movie was pushed back by Warner Bros. The Best Actress nominee clearly loved the additions, and I know it enriched the movie for me.
You can check out Christian Bale’s thoughts on whether The Bride! is a love story and a breakdown of the movie’s ambiguous ending from our exclusive interviews. And, take a look at our The Bride! review, along with what else critics are saying about it here on CinemaBlend.
