Hildur Guðnadóttir: Scoring The Bride! and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Hildur Guðnadóttir calls 2026 her “monster year.” The Icelandic composer went from releasing indie-classical solo cello albums to becoming an awards-magnet film composer, with BAFTAs, GRAMMYs, and an Academy Award to her name. It was her score for the Joaquin Phoenix-starring Joker that brought her the Oscar gong, as well as awards hosts stumbling over the pronunciation of her surname, when she had already won international fandom from her music for HBO’s Chernobyl. And the reason she deems this year as monstrous is following her work on 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and the Maggie Gyllenhaal-directed The Bride!. She chats about her journey from indie musician to one of Hollywood’s most in-demand composers, working on these idiosyncratic films back to back, and why Cubase is key to her work.

Born in the capital of Reykjavík, Guðnadóttir was raised by musicians: an opera singer mother, and a clarinettist and composer father. And, in a nice reminder of what a tiny yet prolifically musical country Iceland is, her brother plays guitar and keys in Agent Fresco, whose singer, Arnór Dan, is also known for his collaborations with composer Ólafur Arnalds. The cello entered her life at age five, and she had already begun professionally gigging at 10, playing with her mother at a restaurant.

Her solo career began back in 2006, with the release of her debut solo album Mount A, at the time going by the moniker Lost In Hildurness. She continued releasing solo records and began composing for film and television in 2011. After relocating to Berlin, Guðnadóttir shared a studio with composers Dustin O’Halloran and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, who are both associated with the ‘neoclassical’ music scene, alongside the likes of Arnalds and Nils Frahm. She played cello for Jóhannsson on his scores for the acclaimed Denis Villeneuve films Prisoners, Sicario, and Arrival. 

With her foot firmly in the Hollywood door, her career gained rapid momentum as she wrote the music for films including Mary Magdalene, the Sicario sequel Day of the Soldado, and her much-loved score for the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. 2019 was stacked with superhero films, and she worked on one of the year’s standouts with the genre-defying Joker. This was her Oscar-winning moment, sharing in the film’s success, with Joaquin Phoenix also winning Best Actor for his role as the beloved Batman villain.

Guðnadóttir joins the call and is hit with the big question: as Iceland famously has an extraordinary creative output for such a tiny population, why would you wish to leave (albeit for another very special creative place, Berlin)?

“Iceland is wonderful, and I'm so grateful that I got to grow up there,” she says earnestly. “It's an incredible music community with incredible people. Growing up in that environment was so special, and it still affects me in such a big way. But the downside to Iceland is that it's very small and quite isolated. 

"When you're travelling a lot, it's not the most practical place to live — you have to wake up very early for any flight that you take, and you normally have to have connecting flights and all of these things. So in my touring days, it felt like it made more sense to live somewhere a bit more central. I ended up staying in Berlin. I really love it here. I'll go back to Iceland, though, eventually; I think we all go back in the end.”

For Guðnadóttir, going from the indie-classical scene to scoring some of the biggest Hollywood films, just as her contemporaries such as O’Halloran and Volker Bertelmann have, is perfectly logical in her mind due to her fascination with communication and narrative.

“For me, music is really a form of communication, first and foremost,” she explains. “I think it's a way for me to communicate with myself and try to have an understanding of myself through playing and composing. When you play, especially an instrument that's very unforgiving, like the cello or a string instrument that you can't get away with not practising, that shows up – fast. 

"So you have this mirror of where you are, and you have this way of getting to know yourself through music. I have worked with bands a lot before, but it was when I started writing and recording my own music that I started to understand myself as not just a musician, but also as a person. And I think that stories and character studies have always been a huge interest for me.

“When I was 19 or 20, I started working in theatre, and I started having an understanding of how music could amplify stories, and it feels like film was a natural development of that interest, of stories and human understanding. Not that I have a complete understanding yet of the human experience, but it's this striving to understand people and also people that 

"I find confusing and potentially difficult. Because the more foreign people are to me, the more I try to understand them. So I didn't especially seek out to become a film composer, but it felt like a natural thing, and it's just one of the mediums I work in. I still work in theatre, and I’ve just worked on a performance at the Royal National Theatre in London with Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss that’s coming up.”

There certainly is a through thread there — the soundscapes she created on her first solo LP, Without Sinking, full of eerie and harsh cello textures, can be heard all the way through to her work on Chernobyl and Joker. The style of textural string playing and writing in both her own scores and her collaborations with Jóhann Jóhannsson has been shamelessly ripped off in many other scores — none more mercilessly than the descending low strings ostinato from Sicario.

Film awards season 2026 has drawn to a close, and even though six years have now passed since her own Oscar win, Guðnadóttir laughs that, “My name is now permanently prefixed with ‘Academy Award winner.’” 

But, jokes aside, recalling that she took that life-changing moment as an opportunity to talk about how much it means to her to be a female composer in a very male-dominant corner of the film industry in her acceptance speech, Headliner asks if she’s feeling optimistic about film music becoming more diverse. There are many encouraging signs, but she was only the third woman to ever scoop the award, and the first to do so in over 20 years. There hasn’t been a female winner since, and the 2026 nominees were all male. 

So, while the strong stereotype of a film composer being a middle-aged white man is slowly shifting with more female and global majority composers making it their career, the progress is certainly slow.

“I do feel that it's going in the right direction, but I do wish that it was going a little bit faster,” she laughs. “It's been six years, and I think that only one woman has been nominated since then, and all male winners, of course. I think that's across all the award circuits, not just the Oscars. I know that we've had some more women in the gaming awards who have been nominated. But I feel like we should be seeing more, and I was hoping for more of a change, but I guess good things happen slowly.”

Guðnadóttir’s 2026 began with the release of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the second film in the new sequel trilogy that relaunches the 28 Days Later franchise. This was never going to be the film for some Hans Zimmer copycat; while these new films are reboots, they have the feel of indie Brit-flicks in style. 2025’s 28 Years Later, which saw director Danny Boyle returning at the helm, is surely one of the quirkiest franchise reboot films ever released, with its rapid editing style and a very unique score from the Scottish band Young Fathers.

However, Guðnadóttir reveals it wasn’t a case of following on from the band’s score for the first film at all: “The crazy thing was that both parts were shot almost simultaneously, and the post-production happened almost simultaneously. So we were working on both films at the same time, and I got the scripts to both films. I started fairly early, and all I knew at the time was that Young Fathers were doing the score for the first film, and that was my whole knowledge throughout this whole process. 

"I knew Young Fathers' music, so I knew roughly what sound worlds they're coming from. But I never got to hear a note of what they were doing, and I didn't see a single frame of part one. I saw part one in the cinema with everyone else, and it was my first time hearing any of their score. And that was terrifying in a way, because I was crossing my fingers and hoping for the best and that somehow these stories were going to work together.”

Despite this unorthodox approach, what is certain is that Guðnadóttir could not have been a better pick for The Bone Temple. This entry was directed by Nia DaCosta, who had previously collaborated with the Icelandic composer on Hedda. Alex Garland returned as the writer, and the story focuses on the characters portrayed brilliantly by Ralph Fiennes and Jack O’Connell, shifting away from Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Guðnadóttir’s trademark cello writing and performing, more eerie and foreboding than ever, finds a perfect home in this post-apocalyptic movie, which people love to fiercely debate whether it is or isn’t a zombie franchise.

“Everything came together so naturally,” she recalls. “The edit was so clear, the direction was so clear. It flowed in such a great way, and the whole process of working on this film was so joyous. There were hardly any scenes that we struggled to find the right tone for. I hope people will feel that when they watch it. 

"I've only had one screening with an audience at the premiere, and obviously, at the premiere, everyone was very excited, but you could feel in the audience this sense of communal joy, where people were laughing so much, and then they stood up and applauded when the crazy Iron Maiden scene happened. The performances and the use of the music scenes, like Duran Duran; they're just so weird and wonderful. It's all these things that you think aren't going to work that are just so fun somehow.”

Sticking with the macabre vibes, another major 2026 film for Guðnadóttir is The Bride, in which she collaborated with some other supremely talented women, including director Maggie Gyllenhaal, who gained acting fame from films such as Donnie Darko and The Dark Knight, and lead actor Jessie Buckley, who has also just joined the Oscar-winners club for her role in Hamnet as of this year. Hot on the heels of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein from the tail-end of last year, we get another spin on Mary Shelley’s tale, in which the creature, here known as Frank and played by Christian Bale, requests a partner. Buckley’s character is transformed into the titular Bride.

It’s undoubtedly one of the most unique soundtracks Guðnadóttir has worked on, which features songs performed by Gyllenhaal’s brother, Jake, who plays Ronnie Reed in the film. There are also musical contributions from Swedish artist Fever Ray.

“Talk about 2026 being my monster year in every way,” she laughs. “Zombies, Frankenstein, and the living dead seem to be the theme for my year. The Bride! has this very strong sense of opposing elements coming together. It's about life and death, this crazy romance and also this kind of raucous violence. It's very punk but also very classical. The film is always looking at these blacks and whites, and finding the area where they become grey. I think with this film, Maggie is trying to access how to be someone, create something, or have something that doesn't fit in just one box.”

In terms of becoming Gyllenhaal’s composer bride of sorts for the project, Guðnadóttir reveals that it all hinged on sharing some early musical ideas and seeing if they were in sync with finding the right sound for the film. 

“She [Gyllenhaal] called me up, and we had all these conversations. I think I was an interesting choice, because I really do live in two worlds; I play in a metal band, and I’m a classical musician. I studied classical music, and the cello is my main instrument, but I live very much in the experimental – the metal, and the electronic worlds. So I think that's probably what made me one of the people on the list, because she knew that the music was going to have to play a very specific role. 

"I did start out writing the love theme as an experiment to see if we were speaking the same language and whether or not to jump on the project. This love theme, I guess you could call it a demo, instantly connected with her. From that moment, we decided that I'd jump on board with her.”

When a film has such a stunning ensemble cast as The Bride does, namely Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Penélope Cruz, it’s interesting to ponder how the on-screen performances affect the approach of the composer. 

For Guðnadóttir, it was a case of recognising that “A film like The Bride! has a lot more locations. It covers a lot more distance, not just physically, and the characters are also very complex. I mean, Jesse plays three different characters, basically simultaneously with all different accents; she's both alive and dead, and she's speaking with an English accent and an American accent,” she says with a hearty laugh. “And I think the music has to live in that space too. The film is telling a lot of different stories, and even more stories than it appears to be telling at the time. So the music has to play a lot of different roles.”

Behind the scenes, these films, like the majority of Guðnadóttir’s scores, were created using Steinberg’s Cubase digital audio workstation software. She describes why, having tried a number of the leading DAWs available, Cubase serves her film composing work in the most harmonious way.

“I started working in Cubase when I started to do more film work, because I’m not a big fan of MIDI, and I’m not a big fan of sample libraries. Because, in my heart of hearts, I’m really a performer. I love recording music, and I love being in a room with people who are playing music,” she explains. “That’s really where I feel most at home, and I feel most energised by that environment, that live playing element of music. But the nature and the speed at which you’re often required to work in film does require you to work with sample libraries, and it does require you to do demos and mock-ups and those kinds of things. So I do sometimes have to befriend MIDI and the keyboard, which is not my preferred instrument.

“Cubase feels like the most inviting environment for me to work with in that sense; the MIDI environment and the timeline environment are very inviting – and straightforward and easy to get into. Before, I was working in Pro Tools and Ableton a lot, and Ableton is not really great for timeline and film timecode work. And with Pro Tools, at least at the time when I was starting out in film, I felt the MIDI environment was not super straightforward. 

"I think it’s changed a lot now, but now I’ve just got so used to Cubase that it’s hard to change back. And also, they’re such great people at Cubase. They’re lovely people, and they’re so supportive of people working on films. They’re open to suggestions and so kind when you have to work around some problems – you can contact them directly.”

Life and music continue apace for Guðnadóttir. She just returned to the stage at the Barbican Hall in London to perform music from her 2025 solo record, Where to From. The album is available to buy on vinyl and CD via the legendary classical record label, Deutsche Grammophon, as well as being on all streaming platforms. The scores for The Bride! and The Bone Temple are also both out now, and this trailblazing composer ends with some tantalising film news: “My next film is going to be Enemies, a really cool film which will be my first time working with A24; Austin Butler and Jeremy Allen White are the main actors,” she discloses with a smile.

Artist photographs by Timothée Lambrecq and Camille Blake.

THE BRIDE! A Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Niko Tavernise.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple image courtesy of Sony Pictures.