(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 31 August 2025 13:30, UK
Known for his incredibly dedicated method acting and also for not particularly being a fan of cinematographers walking across his set, Christian Bale has come a long way since he played a young boy separated from his parents in Steven Spielberg’s war epic Empire of the Sun in 1987.
The Welsh-born actor was just 13 when he was cast by Spielberg in that role, after the youngster appeared in a TV series in which the director’s wife was starring. Unfortunately, though, the fame brought by appearing in a major Hollywood movie did Bale more harm than good after he was bullied at school, and he turned his back on acting for several years, only agreeing to appear in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V in 1989.
Throughout the 1990s, Bale took on bit parts and small roles but never reached the same heights as his movie debut. That was until the 2000 movie American Psycho, which was a huge success. Bale played the lead role in the movie adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’s cult hit novel, and the film achieved similarly notorious acclaim.
It was the first time that Bale showed his need and desire to inhabit a character completely; he exercised and tanned for months to play Patrick Bateman, and it paid off in spades with the film becoming a hit with critics and audiences, and even now, twenty-five years on, it can be seen in endless memes online.
Unfortunately for Bale, however, he immediately made a string of career choices that proved disastrous, opting to appear in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the dragon-battering Reign of Fire and sci-fi movie Equilibrium, all of which fared very poorly at the box office.
He did bounce back with an incredibly committed performance in The Machinist in 2004, a film for which he lost 30kg in a short period of time by not eating, only smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey, although to be fair that’s the same diet most people have at University.
Then came his casting in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, marking the beginning of Bale’s career peak that has so far lasted for two decades. He reprised his role as the Caped Crusader in the other two films in the trilogy, which as a set brought in over $2.5b at the box office and established Bale as an A-lister able to carry a major blockbuster.
Since then, he has shown real depth to his range, playing a finance exec in The Big Short, a veteran racing driver in Le Mans ‘66 and US Vice President Dick Cheney in a transformational role in Vice.
Although Bale has cited the likes of Gary Oldman as inspiration in terms of acting, another of his influences is perhaps a far more unusual one. Mr Bean and Blackadder star Rowan Atkinson was on his way to becoming a recognisable TV star during the mid-1980s and in 1984 was appearing in London’s West End alongside a then 10-year-old Bale.
As Bale explains: “One of [my] first jobs ever was with Rowan Atkinson and I think I look at him as the template. He was playing… The Nerd, it was called, by Larry Shue. He would come out, we’d say hello, but he didn’t really socialise. None of us knew him – it was before he did Mr Bean. And he would just become this character, but before he went on stage.”
Atkinson was on the brink of being a major face on the UK comedy scene at the time; Blackadder was about to start filming a second series and the comic already had several theatre productions and TV series under his belt. Bale found him an ideal performer to study, however, adding: “I would just watch him; I would see him becoming a character. I was mesmerised. And then he just stayed in character for the whole night. And it wasn’t until the whole thing was finished that he invited me to say hello and that I actually spoke to him for the first time. It dawned on me that this was my learning phase. I went, ‘Oh, that’s how it’s done then, is it? OK, great.’”
After a quiet couple of years without a film credit, Bale will be seen next year in the Maggie Gyllenhaal-directed monster movie The Bride! alongside Penelope Cruz.
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