Inside Jessie Buckley’s journey from 'The Bride!' to 'Hamnet'

"The woman you discover at the beginning of 'Hamnet' is the woman that I birthed in myself in 'The Bride!,'" Buckley says. Even though it's now in theaters, "The Bride!" was shot before "Hamnet."

The Oscar-winning role — Agnes — "has a language unto her own, is deeply embodied and read to love wildly and on her own," she explains. "When Agnes is able to let Will go, it's because she has a substantial love. The love that I experienced and explored in 'The Bride!' was like my heart cracked wide open."

Buckley credits "Bride!" director Maggie Gyllenhaal with taking those risks. When the two met on "The Lost Daughter," "there was a meeting of minds and souls. We were speaking a language together and I can't really describe what that is. Sometimes, it's just somebody looking into your eyes and saying, 'I see you and I dare you to go to the place that maybe you don't know yet. But I know I can guide you.'"

Gyllenhaal wrote and directed "The Bride!" after seeing the original "Bride of Frankenstein," and was surprised to discover that the bride (played by Elsa Lanchester) appeared only briefly and didn't say anything.

"It made me very curious about what she might be thinking or feeling," she says. "The Bride!" is her answer, "especially because she finds herself in such an insane situation, having been brought back from the dead without her consent."

To give author Mary Shelley a voice in the new film, Gyllenhaal includes her as a character. As a reference to the "Frankenstein" book, the bride coughs up some black inky liquid that's blocking her throat, heart, veins and expression. "That clearing of that old black silencing stuff is marked across her face but marked in a way that looks beautiful on Jessie's face."

That black mark, Buckley assumes, "is almost like the ink that Mary Shelley wrote 'Frankenstein' from. Things that she wants to say when she is reinvigorated comes pouring out of her."

"Obviously it's an incredible book," Gyllenhaal adds. "But I closed the book and thought, 'I wonder if Mary Shelley had a bit more she wanted to say, that was not only unpublishable in 1820, but unthinkable.'"

In Gyllenhaal's film, the bride finds her own autonomy, Buckley adds, "and Mary Shelley is like, 'That's my girl.'"

"In her original story, she creates this incredible creature born out of the parts of humanity that are broken and she sews them together," she continues. "What makes the monster monstrous is loneliness. All he's asking for is love."

In Gyllenhaal's film, that monster goes on a journey of self-discovery and finds the bride.

"When people admire each other — and Jessie and I do this all the time — we take little things that are helpful in order to express ourselves from the other's vocabulary. And the bride does that with Mary Shelley," Gyllenhaal says. "This movie is a celebration of all the parts of all of us that will not fit into the box that we've been told we need to fit into."

In "Hamnet," Buckley's character, Agnes, feels that constraint, too.

Over the two weeks between films, "I had to kind of distill all that really incredible energy and put my hands in the ground," Buckley says. "But, what a gift to know both these women are inside of me. I'm never going to let them go."