The Disney song that haunted Christian Bale on the set of ‘3:10 to Yuma’
Since the turn of the new millennium, Christian Bale has delivered one rousing performance after another, always with a remarkable dedication to the acting profession, whether physical or mental in nature. We’ve seen Bale in some of contemporary cinema’s most iconic roles, including Batman and Patrick Bateman.
But way before we’d seen Bale perform in such incredible roles in the 21st century, he had made a surprising musical turn back in 1992 following the success of his breakthrough in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. When Bale joined the film Newsies, he hadn’t released the Disney film was a musical, but took the job on anyway and sang his heart out.
Bale’s appearance in the Kenny Ortega movie is something of an anomaly in the career of Christian Bale, but it proved even early into his career that there is nothing that he cannot achieve in the world of performance. A dance through the streets of New York, inspired by the Newsboys’ Strike of 1989, stands as a strange inclusion in the English actor’s legacy.
For whatever reason, when Bale made the 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma, he found his past effort on Newsies was suddenly haunting him. It’s likely because there was a song in particular from the musical that shared its name with the city that Bale was filming the western in, so he couldn’t help but be reminded.
In a conversation with The Chicago Tribute, Bale explained, “When I first arrived in Santa Fe, I could not get the song from Newsies out of my head. Every time somebody said ‘Santa Fe’, it would just go off in my head. And it hadn’t gone off in my head for whatever it is, 16 years or something.”
The actor continued, “Damn it if every time I saw a road sign or somebody mentioned it… and it took a good month or so for that to quit. [But] I definitely kept that inside. I wasn’t letting anybody know about it.” There was a touch of shame in Bale in the fact that he didn’t tell any of his co-stars or the film’s crew about being haunted by the Newsies song.
Still, Bale had once admitted that he has fond memories of Newsies, once telling Movieline, “I look back on it rather fondly now. It was either go to college or go to California and do Newsies. I decided to do the film, which was an education.” Check out the trailer for the film below.
