Christian Bale explains why he didn’t care about being Batman type after Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Now widely acclaimed, Bale started out as a child actor in several high-profile films in the late 80s, including Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun and Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare adaptation Henry V. Although its cast as Patrick Bateman in 1999’s American Psycho boosted his career considerably, it was still somewhat risky to play the role of the iconic caped crusader when Nolan cast him in Batman Begins, as his bankability was relatively untested.
Before Bale, Batman had gone through several iterations on the big screen with far more recognizable movie stars. Michael Keaton was at the height of his career after his comedic turns in Mr. Mom and Beetlejuice when he was cast for Tim Burton’s take on Batman. Val Kilmer was at the peak of his popularity from his heartthrob days in Top Gun and Willow, as well as his dramatic turn as Jim Morrison in the biopic The Doors, when he joined Joel Schumacher’s campier take. Like Bale, George Clooney was relatively untested as a movie star when he took over from Kilmer for Batman & Robin, mostly taking advantage of the immense popularity of his role in ER, but Clooney’s post-Batman career saw him through. rocketed to the A-list. People initially scoffed at Nolan’s idea of a more realistic Batman, but the Dark Knight Trilogy received critical acclaim and is considered by many fans to be their favorite version of the character.
Despite playing the iconic role over the course of three films, Bale never cared about being typecast afterwards. In a recent interview with GQ, the actor shares that he was warned against taking on the role, but in the end, it seems like that attracted him more to the role than repelled it. Read what Bale has to say below:
In a lot of ways, the same way people were telling me you can’t play Patrick Bateman, it’s career suicide, and I was like, ‘Go ahead, I really want to do this. Other people also said, “Hey, you know if you play Batman, that’s all.” You’ll never play anything else again, you’ll always be Batman. And I said, “Go ahead.” Let’s see if that happens. Because I’ve always wanted to watch, if I don’t have the skills to be able to rise above that, then I don’t deserve it either.
Christian Bale’s career goes far beyond playing Batman
Bale has never been an actor who shy away from a challenge and he’s tackled a lot of tough roles during his career. There are the oft-publicized facets of his intense acting method that the tabloids love to focus on, such as Bale’s extreme weight gain and loss of roles. At his lowest point, he weighed 120 pounds for his haunted factory worker in 2004’s The Machinist, and at his highest, over 225 pounds for roles in 2013’s American Hustle and 2018’s Vice. from this superficial aspect, he inhabits his roles with intense emotional engagement, lending the same gravitas to playing a soldier buried in a Vietnamese POW camp in Rescue Dawn as he does to playing a villain in a highly stylized Marvel film like Thor: Love and Thunder. Between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, Bale won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of former crack addict boxer Dicky Eklund in The Fighter.
Evidenced by some of his more idiosyncratic work with director David O. Russell and his satirical turn in American Psycho, the actor has a strong sense of humor and doesn’t excel exclusively in acting. Bale’s performance as Batman will be rightly remembered for both his coldly hollowed-out portrayal of Bruce Wayne and his rage-fueled vigilante alter ego with an imitable voice. Bale has more than proven that the hero will be just one of many roles he will remember in future retrospectives.
Source: GQ
We would love to thank the writer of this post for this outstanding material
Why Christian Bale Wasn’t Worried About Being Cast As Batman | Pretty Reel