While thanking the Lord (alongside your mom, pop and agent) for any success that comes your way is pretty much de rigueur for Hollywooders of every hue, giving a big shout-out to Beelzebub as having a big hand – well, a cloven-ish hoof – in your on-screen achievements is a tad more unusual. Come this year’s Golden Globes, though, that’s exactly what Christian Bale – the UK thespian previously best known for his Batman trilogy – did as part of his Best Actor acceptance speech.
To be fair, given that he took the accolade in question for his performance as Dick Cheney, the decidedly diabolic former US vice-president, in Vice, the crowd pretty much knew where he was coming from. Thankfully, dubious Satanic influences aside, audiences across the world felt that Bale was pretty much on the ball in his interpretation of President Bush’s rightly-scorned right-hand man, a conclusion that awards’ juries across the world seem to have concurred with.
In many ways, it’s a wholly apt recognition for an actor whose commitment to his craft has become the stuff of legend. In order to bring the older, bulkier Cheney to the big screen, for instance, Bale completely transformed his physique, adding a good 18kg and shaving his head. He also hired a movement coach, a speech coach and even acquired a neck exercise machine to nail the look of the famously thick-necked politician.
This, however, was not the first time that the actor had embraced physical change for a role. Indeed, Bale worked out six hours a day to get the killer physique required to portray Patrick Bateman, the charming and good-looking serial killer at the heart of American Psycho (2000). Far more drastic, however, was the resculpting he undertook for The Machinist (2004). In order to fully inhabit the part of Trevor Reznik, a severely-emaciated insomniac factory worker, he lost 28kg and restricted himself to starvation-level rations for months on end.
More impressively still, within just six months of The Machinist’s wrap party, Bale had managed to bulk up 20kg to convincingly don the cape and cowl of the decidedly big and butch Dark Knight in Batman Begins (2005). It was clearly an effort worth making. Bale’s look and performance, together with the visionary genius of director Christopher Nolan, saw the movie – and its two sequels – set a new highwater mark for cinematic superheroics and for action movies in general.
While his fans and the film fraternity alike remain in awe of his on-screen chameleon-esque abilities, there is one off-screen role that that actor is seemingly forever synonymous with – being notoriously difficult on set. This less-readily-desirable perception stems back to 2009, a time when an audio clip of the actor going ballistic and accusing cinematographer Shane Hurlbut of walking through his shot during the filming of Terminator: Salvation leaked online.
A year earlier, in 2008, just before the premiere of The Dark Knight, Bale’s own mother and sister reported him to the police, accusing him of verbally assaulting them at London’s Dorchester Hotel. While it led to the actor being arrested, he was later released without charge.
For some, his volatility and obsessive perfectionism can be traced back to his somewhat erratic childhood. Born in Wales in 1974, his father, David, was a pilot, while his mother, Jenny, earned her living as a circus clown. The demands of his mother’s profession saw the family lead a somewhat itinerant life, with young Bale growing up in an eclectic range of locales, including the south coast of England, Portugal and the US.
Pushed towards a life in show business as a child, he found himself auditioning for TV commercials and the like from the age of eight onwards. Then, at just 12, he debuted in Empire Of The Sun (1987), director Steven Spielberg’s WWII coming-of-age drama, to considerable acclaim.
Despite this early success, it proved to be a difficult time for Bale. His sudden shift into the spotlight made him the target for many of his school’s most vicious bullies, to the extent that he almost called quits on his acting career there and then. Fortunately for film fans everywhere, he thought again and continued on the path to Hollywood superstardom.
While Vice is still on international release, he is scheduled to return to the world’s multiplexes over the coming summer in Ford v. Ferrari, the true-life tale of the rivalry between two of the world’s finest motor-racing marques. Even in the unlikely event that it crashes and burns, it’s still fair to say that Bale has had a hell of a career.
Text: Suchetana Mukhopadhyay
