The one accent Christian Bale regrets using: “I feel like a tit”
It speaks volumes of Christian Bale’s chameleonic nature that despite being a working actor for the last four decades, many people have no idea what his natural speaking voice is, and more than a few remain blissfully unaware that he was born in Pembrokeshire and raised in Bournemouth.
Ever since his breakout role in Mary Harron’s cult classic American Psycho, Bale has built his brand on transforming his body and voice for almost every role. While he sometimes bristles at the amount of focus his dramatic physical alterations tend to generate, he’s brought it on himself in a way by buffing up, slimming down, packing on the pounds, and emaciating himself so many times.
Bale has used a variety of accents hailing from all corners of America and beyond, and he’s never been anything other than entirely convincing. Hollywood history has been plagued by actors who thought they could pull off a certain brogue and then botch it so badly that it turns their performance into a laughing stock, which isn’t a club he’s ever going to find himself in unless he starts phoning it in.
Even though he’d headlined a Steven Spielberg movie, played a major supporting role in 1994’s star-studded adaptation of Little Women, voiced a key character in Disney’s animated Pocahontas, stole scenes in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, turned Patrick Bateman into an unlikely icon, shared the screen with Nicolas Cage in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, battled dragons in the preposterous Reign of Fire, and antagonised Samuel L Jackson in Shaft, Bale wasn’t considered a movie star until Batman Begins.
Those who followed his career knew fine well he was British, and while there was the expected – and very minor – backlash from the diehard comic book fans furious at the idea of an actor from the United Kingdom playing Gotham City’s favourite son, Bale tried to have his cake and eat it by adopting Bruce Wayne’s accent for the entirety of the Christopher Nolan prequel’s promotional tour.
For whatever reason, he decided that the best way to avoid having people question why an Englishman was playing Batman was to pretend he was American all along. It was a bizarre commitment to the bit that felt highly unnecessary when it didn’t really matter where he was from, and the Academy Award winner admitted that he probably shouldn’t have done it.
“When I was doing Batman, I just went, ‘Oh god, no one’s gonna buy it if I’ve got an English accent,'” he told Radio 1. “But then, if you listen to the interviews, I’ve got a really bad American accent throughout most of it. I can’t help it. It was just my Englishness coming through because I’m not actually playing the character, and I feel like a tit if I’m just completely doing that voice. It’s quite embarrassing when I see behind-the-scenes stuff.”
Basically, Bale nailed his American accent for Batman Begins, opted to use a slightly different one when he was promoting the movie, admitted that it was crap, and ended up wishing he’d never bothered. Fortunately, he learned his lesson and hasn’t felt the same need to do it again.
