The Bride Christian Bale Jessie Buckley on Embracing Our MONSTROUS Sides Exclusive

I'm looking around. Where is it, Jessie? The BAFTA. Oh, um, it's at home somewhere. In a suitcase, probably. Safely stored. Um, I gave it to my husband. Congratulations on that. I didn't say congratulations on that. Right. Yeah. And you made the Princess of Wales cry, apparently. I'm malicious like that. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, let's hope it's good. She's probably, no, I actually won't say that. I have a feeling that you guys are gonna be getting many more awards after watching this movie. Congratulations on what is a rollercoaster ride. Well, this one, this one, mate, she's the goat, but I just smell like a goat. No, he's gonna like, just, you know, this whole interview, he's gonna like, put himself on the lowest keel, and it's not acceptable. It's where I like to be. Okay, let's start with Frank, because he's a fantastic character, and you've played so many roles where you have to kind of dig deep emotionally. What did this character bring out in you? Well, first off, you can't play Frankenstein's monster without giving a nod to Karloff, right? Because you can't beat him, he's the king of it. And so I looked at him and said, all right, you gotta do that. And I viewed it as Frank's reel. Mary Shelley wrote about what she had heard, and Galvani and all of that reanimation science that he was going through. She got some of it right, she got some of it wrong. And then you've got Karloff, who spoke with witnesses, who said, no, he's got this, you know, scar. All right, he got that right. Flathead got that totally wrong. That was the hairstyle. And so Frank's reading this and going, oh, and seeing these, and seeing the interpretation of his life. But now the real difference, and Sid Vicious in my way, right, walking down the steps with the white jacket on, bit of the blood, Richie Manic from Manic Street Preachers, cutting himself and everything. And then you've got the wisdom of somebody who's had to be by themselves in that intense, crazy, you know, sorrowful loneliness for so long because of the guilt, the remorse, the pain he's got from the terrible crimes he committed as this giant man-child with the worst parent ever in history. But going, he can't live like this any longer. You know, he's gonna die of loneliness, and he needs somebody. He needs some sort of a companion. And so he takes that risk, and he'd have been happy with a piece of bread or something that, you know, that would sit with him and maybe hold his hand occasionally. And instead he gets, you know, this absolute insane, there you go, right, buttery croissant. A pile of chocolate. Who's just the most lively, live wire, authentic, sharp, brilliant person that he could ever imagine. And he's barely hanging on, on this rollercoaster ride with the two of them going. There was a line which you say in the film, which is about apologizing for the smell, which really got me. Because I'm so thankful that we haven't got the technology quite yet, where we've got this- We do have the technology. Scratch and sniff. It's actually totally appropriate for this, isn't it? What's scratch and sniff? Where you watch a movie, and then it tells you scratch, and there's a little thing, and it goes scratch it, and then you- No way. You get to smell. What it would smell like at that moment, yeah. But you get, she got to experience that without any scratch and sniff all the time. It smelled good to me. And Jessie, you play three characters brilliantly in this. And I understand you were kind of, before taking it on, a little bit nervous about the movements and the accents. You absolutely smashed it. How did you approach it? Yeah, with like a huge boggle of nerves, and going, I have no idea how to do this. But then you just put kind of one foot in front of the other. And I'm a bit of a magpie. Like, I just need to kind of open my eyes, and whatever instinctively feels like delicious, be like, oh, that's an interesting texture. That's an interesting texture. And then put it into a big pot of soup, and hope that in some way it'll come out and be fun to play. And it really, like, it was. It was a trick. Like, it was a trick to live with kind of these three voices inside me, but that were essential for this character, for the bride to discover herself in her totality. You know? And don't we all have those voices in our heads? The ones that are like, how dare you say that? I'm going through the menopause right now. I've always got those voices in my head. So both characters, they do really- What are they telling you to do right now? Dare I, dare I tell you? I'm not sure what you said, like. Filmmaking would be so boring if you went into each film thinking, yeah, I know exactly how to do this. And if you went into it feeling like, yeah, this is no challenge whatsoever. It's exciting precisely because each project feels like the first one you've ever done. And you can't believe that anyone's hired you again because they've got no idea, and this is the voice in my head, that you're telling yourself, I have no clue how to do this whatsoever. That's amazing. So both your characters, they do like violent, awful stuff. And I love a quote from Maggie that says, everyone's, every one of us has something monstrous inside us. So playing these roles, did it allow you to kind of be more gentler on yourselves on the thoughts that we may have as human beings? No, I love all those thoughts. Anyway, I enjoy having all those thoughts, and I think it's also essential, isn't it? Because life becomes a total farce. It becomes a performance. If all you're doing is accepting the sort of order and the performative nature of being eternally optimistic and being a good person, which ultimately ends up with just being a bored person who's not living life properly anyway, instead of accepting that everyone's got chaos to them and this sort of need for the Dionysus within them. And so that's what they embrace. I'm completely obsessed with 24 Hours in Police Custody on Channel 4. Have you ever watched it? No. It's unbelievable. And you know, you can see people, even if you try to repress the monster, it comes out. Like if you're just living a mundane life, there's just like little valves that are like, you know, and I think that's where monstrosity comes from. And that's where, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, you know, he's a beautiful creature that's made from the broken bits of humanity that's locked into an attic. And it's his loneliness that creates his maliciousness. He says, I'm miserable. I'm malicious because I'm miserable. Oh yeah, I forgot that, yes. And I think if you try and decipher a section of humanity off it will always come back to bite you in the ass. And I think also from, you know, the bride's point of view, she's coming, it's like when you go away from where you live and then you come back and you see things with completely new eyes for a little while and you've got the perspective on what it means and the **** of it and what's good and all of that. After a while, you can't see the wood for the trees again, you know, because everything just goes in. But she's there. She's been given the second chance at life. Her eyes are open and she is just gonna live full throttle in full protest of everything she recognizes as being insincere and ****. Incredible. Jessie, sitting here, I remember first seeing you in the UK on a TV show. And I remember at the time you said that you'd been turned down by two drama schools, which blows my mind. I mean, what would you say to your 17, 18-year-old self now? I mean, I think they were absolutely right to turn me down. By the way, I think I was not, I wasn't ready and I didn't know what I wanted to say. I was young and I needed to go. It probably helped you a lot. It helped me. You've got to go and live life. And actually, I think for young people, I would say you've got to go do lots of things. You know, go work in a market, go work in a pub, go travel, you know, sleep with those people, get drunk on a Friday night. Like, do it all. That's where you learn to be a human. End up on, what was that show you like? 24 Hours of... End up on that. I'm really working towards it. I think also, like, absolutely pursue failure with a vengeance as well. That is really helpful. But I am very proud of that, young woman. I, you know, I think it's, you know, growing up and especially those younger ages, they're difficult to kind of... That's where you're really finding yourself and it's really uncomfortable in that moment. Well, you both, absolutely incredible. Yeah, thank you so much for making this movie because it's so enjoyable and I think it's going to be great.