As Hollywood productions begin to pick up steam again, it seems as if everyone in the film industry has Frankenstein on their minds.
One of the year’s first studio releases was Diablo Cody and Zelda Williams’ “Lisa Frankenstein,” which reimagined Mary Shelley’s classic novel of reanimation gone wrong as a contemporary teen comedy. That film will be followed by two other high profile adaptations that entered production this month: Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” which stars Oscar Isaac as the mad scientist alongside Mia Goth and Jacob Elordi as The Monster; and Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s upcoming sophomore feature, which reportedly stars Christian Bale as a version of Frankenstein’s monster who pursues love in 1930s Chicago in a riff on “The Bride of Frankenstein.”
Gyllenhaal’s film will be a highly anticipated event thanks to the success of her directorial debut “The Lost Daughter” and the A-list cast, which also includes Penélope Cruz, Jessie Buckley, Annette Bening, and Gyllenhaal’s husband Peter Sarsgaard. While many details are being kept under wraps, Sarsgaard shared some hints about the film’s tone in a new interview with The Independent.
“It’s this big, romantic, deeply romantic, wild, punk monster movie,” Sarsgaard said of the project, in which he plays a detective trailing the monster through Chicago. “I think it’s going to be energizing! It’s rambunctious! People are going to be very surprised that this is Maggie’s second movie. It is nothing, at all, like ‘The Lost Daughter.’”
The idea of seeing Christian Bale play such an iconic movie monster will be an enticing proposition for cinephiles. And given the actor’s history of undergoing radical physical transformations for roles, the possibilities for his Frankenstein monster look are truly endless. The actor did offer one hint about his preparation for the film at a recent charity event, where he told The Hollywood Reporter that he was planning to shave his head for the role once production started.
“I’ve got to shave my head next week [for a movie],” Bale said. “I asked them to please let me hold off on doing that but everyone was going, ‘What’s wrong with Bale? What’s up with him?’”
No release date for Gyllenhaal’s Frankenstein movie has been announced.
