Thanks to Mary Shelley, 'The Bride!' finally speaks her truth

Maggie Gyllenhaal's \

Like the title character of her new movie “The Bride!,” Maggie Gyllenhaal got possessed by Mary Shelley.

In crafting her genre-smashing take on “The Bride of Frankenstein,” the director went down a Shelley rabbit hole. Even though she has a literature degree, Gyllenhaal had never read the British author’s 19th-century gothic classic “Frankenstein.”

“I loved it, of course, obviously,” she says, and the prose sparked her creativity like a bolt of lightning in a mad scientist’s lab.

“I remember thinking, or fantasizing, or wishing, that maybe there was a whole lot more that Mary Shelley wanted to say, that was not only unpublishable in 1818 but actually maybe even unthinkable,” Gyllenhaal says, referring to women and their lack of agency at the time. “And once I thought that, Mary Shelley became a kind of guiding force."

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