Peter Sarsgaard enjoyed being directed by his wife Maggie Gyllenhaal on the set of her musical monster movie The Bride!
The Batman star revealed to Variety that his wife cast him as a detective in her film, a reimagining of the Bride of Frankenstein, because she knew he’d enjoy the part.
“I love working with my wife,” he told the publication. “And I think she knew that a lot of the actors that I liked growing up were from film noir, and there were lot of detectives. So she knew that it would be fun for me.”
Sarsgaard previously appeared in Gyllenhaal’s feature directorial debut The Lost Daughter. He recalled how she knew exactly what to say when he became nervous shooting a scene in which his professor character had to give a speech from behind a lectern.
“The way we work together, she really does not say a lot to me. She’s someone who is wonderful at talking to actors, but the little things that she does say are really helpful,” he explained.
“She came up to me and said, ‘You don’t need the lectern.’ Because I kept holding on to it. She said, ‘Walk away from the lectern’… Because it’s not about being comfortable when you act, and I think other directors who don’t know me try to make me comfortable. But that’s really not the way I act best. I like having a gun to my head.”
The Bride!, which marks Gyllenhaal’s second directorial outing, stars Christian Bale as Frankenstein’s Monster and Jessie Buckley as the titular bride. The film also features Penélope Cruz, Annette Bening and Gyllenhaal’s brother Jake.
After witnessing his actress wife became a director, Sarsgaard admitted he would only do the same if the story really spoke to him.
“I would have to have a really, really, really strong need to make a movie in order to go through what, to me, looks like hell to make it,” he stated.
