A new feature interview with actor Christian Bale for GQ magazine has gone into numerous topics of interest, from roles that got away to others he may have regretted taking.
The actor’s most recent appearance was as the villain Gorr the God Butcher in “Thor: Love and Thunder,” a part he was drawn to because he found it an ‘intriguing’ character along with the promise of working with Taika Waititi.
However, when he started doing the role he revealed he was decidedly not a fan of the green screen process:
“That’s the first time I’ve done that. I mean, the definition of it is monotony. You’ve got good people. You’ve got other actors who are far more experienced at it than me.
Can you differentiate one day from the next? No. Absolutely not. You have no idea what to do. I couldn’t even differentiate one stage from the next.
They kept saying, ‘You’re on Stage Three.’ Well, it’s like, ‘Which one is that?’ ‘The blue one.’ They’re like, ‘Yeah. But you’re on Stage Seven.’ ‘Which one is that?’ ‘The blue one.’ I was like, ‘Uh, where?’”
Bale often adopts method acting for his roles, but definitely did not do so on “Thor”. He also revealed that his salary on “American Psycho” was the “absolute minimum they were legally allowed to pay me” and one day the makeup artists were laughing at him because they worked out he was getting paid less than any of them.
Asked about gaining that lead role after Leonardo DiCaprio passed on it, Bale says:
“Look, to this day, any role that anybody gets, it’s only because he’s passed on it beforehand. It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you. It doesn’t matter how friendly you are with the directors.
All those people that I’ve worked with multiple times, they all offered every one of those roles to him first. Right? I had one of those people actually tell me that. So, thank you, Leo, because literally, he gets to choose everything he does. And good for him, he’s phenomenal.
Do you know how grateful I am to get any damn thing? I mean, I can’t do what he does. I wouldn’t want the exposure that he has either. And he does it magnificently. But I would suspect that almost everybody of similar age to him in Hollywood owes their careers to him passing on whatever project it is.”
The interview comes ahead of the actor’s role in the David O. Russell-directed period caper movie “Amsterdam” which opens Friday in cinemas.
