‘American Psycho’: Why Christian Bale ignored his “career suicide” warning
Over the course of several glittering decades, Christian Bale has delivered so many American characters with striking authenticity, that many are shocked when they hear his normal English accent. Indeed, Bale is not American at all, and was in fact born in Harverfordest in Wales in 1974.
At the age of 13, Bale announced himself as a star child actor in Steven Spielberg’s 1987 war movie Empire of the Sun and continued to give further efforts in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, the Disney movie Newsies, Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women and Todd Haynes’ musical drama Velvet Goldmine.
Eventually, though, something had to give with Bale’s career, and he was eventually given a shot at real stardom with the lead role in Mary Harron’s 2000 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho. By playing the film’s protagonist, the psychopathic and horrifically violent serial killing Wall Street banker Patrick Bateman, Bale’s career suddenly opened up.
Interestingly, though, the role of Bateman was seen as something of a risk, particularly by those who wanted to advise Bale on the best course for his career. There was the idea that if Bale got his breakthrough by playing an iconic “villain”, then he would never be able to escape from the role and would forever be typecast in the future.
“[They said] once you play a villain like that, you never get to play anything else because you’re stuck in everyone’s imagination as that person,” Bale had once noted. However, Bale resisted this idea and knew that he could deliver a version of Bateman that was in line with Ellis’ novel and portray Bateman in all his characteristic complexity.
Of course, Bateman is rather one-dimensional in that he just loves to listen to 1980s pop music, kill sex workers, and buy expensive clothing, but Bale saw that he was not just your stereotypical movie villain. “I could never really view him just as a villain, pure and simple because he’s so ridiculous,” the actor explained. “He’s not your ordinary kind of Hannibal Lecter scary villain because you laugh at him, never with him at all.”
Indeed, there’s a satirical element to American Psycho, particularly in Ellis’ novel, albeit one that seemed to fly straight over the heads of many of its earliest critics. Bateman is a parody of the kind of attitude that many Wall Street bankers and New York yuppies had during the excesses of the 1980s and this was something that Bale deep understood.
With that in mind, he knew that playing Bateman was less of a risk than many of his advisors believed and proceeded to announce himself to the 21st century’s cinema audience with a striking and violent role, noting, “I was never really concerned and didn’t take any of those ‘career suicide’ threats seriously. In fact, it was sort of exciting in many ways.”
Considering the kind of career that Bale has enjoyed since playing in American Psycho, it’s clear to see that the “career suicide” warnings were hyperbolic from the outright. After his effort in Harron’s film, Bale went on to feature in The Machinist before eventually taking on the role of Batman in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, a character that couldn’t be any further from Patrick Bateman at all, showing that Bale was right to ignore the threats of typecasting early into his adult career.
