Christian Bale told Entertainment Weekly that he sat in the makeup chair for six hours to transform into Frankenstein’s monster in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride. Bale will star alongside Hamnet Oscar nominee Jesse Buckley, who plays the title role in the remake of the 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein. Buckley spent an hour and a half in the make-up chair transforming into a bride.
“Every day I was screaming like crazy. The restraint you have to show when you sit still for that long just to (release) the feeling of despair,” Bale said of how he kept himself “not crazy” during the six-hour transformation.
“I didn’t want to do it when I was driving to work because I thought I might cause an accident. And I didn’t want to do it alone because I thought everyone would just think I was crazy,” Vail said of the screams. “Oh, I’ll tell you, the whole staff was on board until the end, because people were going to hear us screaming. We opened the door, and gradually, like the Bride Revolution, some people started saying, ‘Can we do this too?’ And by the end, there were about 30 people who heard us and ran to the makeup trailer to join in and scream. ”
Bale is well known for undergoing dramatic physical changes throughout his acting career. For example, he went on an all-protein diet to gain weight for American Psycho, and infamously lost 60 pounds over four months to get to 120 pounds for The Mechanist. His diet in this film was “water, one apple, and one cup of coffee per day.” Bale then gained 100 pounds of muscle in six months to play Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins.
The “Bride!” movie will be released in theaters on March 6th by Warner Bros. For more on the making of the film, visit Entertainment Weekly’s website.
