Chloë Sevigny explains why she was “really intimidated” by Christian Bale
In the early days of Chloë Sevigny’s acting career, she starred in American Psycho, and now, the actor has revealed that she was actually rather “intimidated” by her co-star, Christian Bale.
After starting her career in cinema in 1995 with a role in Larry Clark’s Kids, she appeared in a few more subversive movies, like Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, and Boys Don’t Cry. While the latter earned her an Academy Award nomination, American Psycho, released the following year, was more commercially successful, exposing the actor to a wider audience.
She starred as Jean, the secretary of Bale’s Patrick Bateman, a psychopathic yuppie who embarks on a string of murders as his mental state increasingly descends into insanity. He invites Jean to his apartment in one scene, intending to brutally kill her with a nail gun. Bateman hesitates as he listens to her speak, perhaps because she’s genuinely a good person, unlike everyone else he kills, whom he sees as flawed in some way.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Sevigny expressed how different her approach to acting was compared to Bale, who tried a method style to fully embody Bateman. She explained, “When people take themselves so seriously, I kind of shut down, even though I take my work very seriously, and I love acting and whatnot.”
Sevigny tried to “respect” his approach, but she found it “challenging because I’m very gregarious and silly and goofy, unbeknownst to the general public.” The actor hoped that he would loosen up a bit so that she’d be more comfortable on set. “I was really intimidated by his process and intimidated by him, and I wanted a little more generosity to make myself feel more at ease, which is my own ego,” Sevigny added.
The star admitted that method acting was not something she was very familiar with at the time. “It was a really challenging dynamic for me, but I don’t think that I thought he was bad. I was just kind of confused, like, ‘Why aren’t you being social?’” Sevigny continued.
The actor thinks it’s “curious” how Bale never had any formal training, either, evidently discovering method acting as he made his way through Hollywood. It’s not the only time Bale has altered himself for a role – he lost a drastic amount of weight for The Machinist just a few years later.
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