Christian Bale refused to speak to Johnny Depp on set: “I didn’t want to talk”
The commitment Christian Bale gives to his roles can never be questioned. After all, over the years, he’s gone above and beyond countless times in order to perfectly inhabit his characters. Sometimes, this has involved gaining or losing weight, and he’s been known to maintain certain accents even when the cameras aren’t rolling. For Bale, it’s all part of his process and is the only way he knows how to get the best out of himself. Interestingly, though, his fastidious dedication to verisimilitude once manifested in a refusal to speak a word to his main co-star – and he kept to it for almost the entire shoot.
In 2004, Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34 was published. This non-fiction opus chronicled the battle of wills between notorious bank robber John Dillinger and the man tasked with bringing him down, FBI agent Melvin Purvis, during the Great Depression. Hollywood soon began sniffing around the project, and Michael Mann was installed as the director of a movie adaptation. Leonardo DiCaprio was initially attached to play Dillinger but wound up dropping out to make Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island instead. By 2008, though, production began with Johnny Depp playing Dillinger and Bale portraying Purvis.
Interestingly, in real life, Dillinger and Purvis only met once, and it was extremely brief as it occurred when Dillinger was finally caught by the FBI and shot to death. Mann didn’t want to change history in his movie version of their story, so the film was structured accordingly, with Depp and Bale only sharing one scene at the end of the movie. Bale, therefore, felt it was fitting that he and Depp shouldn’t try to become too chummy because their characters remain elusive to each other for almost the entire story.
Bale told Collider, “The nature of the way that we worked together was very similar to the way of the story. Purvis only that one time caught up with him. Pretty much I only caught up with Johnny that one time. If I was working, he wasn’t.” While some actors might have struggled with working like this, Bale felt precisely the opposite.
He noted: “I quite like that, I have to admit. I quite like it when you’re working with people, and you only get to know them through the scenes that you’re doing together.”
To Bale’s delight, he was pretty sure Depp wasn’t losing any sleep over their isolated working relationship, either – mostly because he also never sought out a chat. When asked by WalesOnline if he and Depp bonded at all during the shoot, he confessed, “I didn’t want to talk unless it was while we were doing a scene,” and added, “Johnny seemed happy to do it that way, too, so I guess the answer is no, we really didn’t get to know each other better between takes.”
All in all, Bale was perfectly content with not speaking a word with Depp until they met on-set. It meant the Dillinger half of the film was totally unknown to him, so when he finally saw the Pirates of the Caribbean star’s performance as the criminal, he was blown away. He mused, “He makes very interesting choices and makes a real variety of movies. I find that interesting. I think naturally he found Dillinger to be a fascinating character, and I think he did a superb job with it.”
In the end, Bale admitted that he went into Public Enemies knowing very little about Depp as a person and emerged from the project still knowing very little – but he wouldn’t have changed a thing. He joked, “I guess I’ll have to wait and get to know Johnny Depp some other day!”
