The Christian Bale movie shut down by the Chernobyl disaster: “We’re done, we have to leave”
There’s no such thing as a movie production destined to go off without a hitch, because the threat of unforeseen circumstances, unexpected obstacles, or external peril can never be wholly eradicated. That said, Christian Bale and his colleagues’ evacuation from the set during the Chernobyl disaster is definitely one of the most unusual.
The 1986 incident remains the worst nuclear disaster in human history, with an accident releasing massive amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere, which caused lasting damage worth an estimated $700 billion, leading to catastrophic health and environmental issues that spread well beyond the titular facility.
Chernobyl has become one of the modern era’s foremost cautionary tales about the dangers of nuclear power, and the disaster has been the subject of countless documentaries, feature films of multiple genres, and an acclaimed HBO miniseries. What’s less well-known is that a future Batman was in Ukraine when it happened, forcing a month-long exile for the cast and crew of Mio in the Land of Faraway.
Despite the nuclear setbacks, the movie marked Bale’s feature debut and was released several months before Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, which announced the child star to the world. For a youngster, heading off to the opposite side of Europe was a daunting proposition, even before the irradiated shit hit the fan.
An international co-production between Sweden, Norway, and what was then the Soviet Union, Bale co-starred alongside Christopher Lee as one of two kids (the other being Nicholas Pickard) who found themselves caught up in a battle against the horror icon’s fearsome Kato, who’s been kidnapping children and turning them into servants by removing their hearts and replacing them with stone.
Lee didn’t have the greatest time shooting it, describing the situation as less than ideal: “The food was uneatable, the sanitation unspeakable, the political people ubiquitous.” Still, some dodgy scran and questionable toilets paled in comparison to being caught up in a devastating nuclear meltdown, but Mio in the Land of Faraway was only shut down for a month.
“We knew something had occurred because production came to us and they said, ‘We’re done. We have to leave’,” Bale recalled in a 2008 interview with Details. “A month later, we were back. We would have somebody with a Geiger counter at every dinner, scanning each plate.”
Working in such close proximity to Chernobyl must have been a daunting process, especially for a kid who was making their first movie and was only 12 at the time. It would have been completely forgivable were Bale to decide that acting wasn’t for him when he spent the rest of his time having his surroundings scanned for signs of potential nuclear contamination, but it goes without saying that he stuck it out.
