The “completely dedicated” actor Michael Caine compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger
Intense preparations, meticulous rehearsals, and top-drawer performances aren’t what anyone would associate with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but Michael Caine was nonetheless left so impressed by a co-star he invoked the name of the ‘Austrian Oak’.
The two-time Academy Award-winning legend has worked with many of cinema’s most recognisable action stars, but Schwarzenegger has never been one of them. He did play the villain in Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground, play a football match with Sylvester Stallone in Escape for Victory, and lend support in Vin Diesel’s The Last Witch Hunter, but the Terminator icon has remained out of his orbit.
Still, Caine saw enough to make the comparison, even if he was overstating things a touch. There aren’t many actors to have possessed bulging biceps like Schwarzenegger, but compared to the last couple of roles they’d played, the rapid-fire bulking was remarkable enough to place them in the same breath.
Whereas Schwarzenegger had been a hefty bloke for his entire adult life and never once looked like anything other than a kilt sock stuffed full of ball bearings, Christian Bale faced a mission to ensure he was ready for the first day of principal photography on Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins.
American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman made it apparent that he was easily capable of attaining a superhero body, but time was of the essence. Bale had dropped an alarming amount of weight for Brad Anderson’s psychological thriller The Machinist and was confirmed as the new Batman in September 2003. That gave him six weeks to transform himself from Trevor Reznik into Bruce Wayne between one movie ending and the other beginning, and Caine could barely believe he managed to pull it off.
“Oh, he’s great to work with,” he marvelled to Black Film. “Completely dedicated. Physically, if you saw what he did with himself, he’s so big. I’d seen him in American Psycho, and then when they said Christian, I said, ‘He’s kind of thin for Batman’. Otherwise, I would have freaked out if I had seen that, The Machinist. But then when I walked on set, there’s Arnold Schwarzenegger standing there. I went, ‘Oops!'”
Ironically, Bale’s binge eating intially saw him go too far. The actor packed on so much poundage that he had to slim back down after several crew members called him ‘Fatman’ when he’d somehow managed to effectively double his body weight in the space of six weeks, going from the emaciated 120 pounds of Reznik to tipping the scales at over 200 for Batman Begins.
It was a herculean effort either way, making a mockery of Caine’s initial belief that Bale was far too scrawny to make a believable ‘Dark Knight’. As well as looking the part, it also helps that he’s one of his generation’s finest talents, even if the evolution from Bateman to Batman took his veteran co-star by surprise.
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