The movie Christian Bale has “enormous regrets” about
The masterful British actor Christian Bale impressively broke through to global acclaim at age 13, appearing in Steven Spielberg’s 1987 war drama Empire of the Sun. Through his teen years into early adulthood, Bale developed his acting through a series of smaller roles, attaining a higher level of celebrity with his appearance as Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron’s 2000 dark comedy American Psycho.
Over the past two decades, Bale has shown his versatility, acting virtuosity and staggering ability for bodyweight manipulation through several critically and commercially favoured movies, including The Machinist, The Prestige, The Dark Knight Trilogy and The Big Short. His portrayal of boxer Dicky Eklund in 2010’s The Fighter also earned him his first and only Academy Award to date.
With this towering oeuvre under his belt, Bale has very little to lament or regret, but his involvement in 2009’s Terminator Salvation appears to hold the most potential in these departments.
The Terminator franchise was kicked off by James Cameron in 1984, and with Arnold Schwarzenegger in his most iconic and well-suited role, it was a huge success. The second movie in the franchise, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, built upon this success, but the franchise took a notable nosedive with Cameron’s departure prior to 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
Terminator Salvation, which arrived six years later as the franchise’s fourth instalment, was initially set to serve as a new trilogy and was the first and only Terminator movie not to star Schwarzenegger. Instead, Bale and Sam Worthington co-starred in central roles.
As Schwarzenegger, the Terminator himself, said of the fourth movie while appearing on Good Morning America, “It sucked.” Terminator Salvation was widely panned by critics upon its release and is generally regarded as the worst movie of the franchise. The movie’s failure was attributable to several factors, including poor writing and notably a lack of chemistry, as Bale’s infamous on-set rant – as seen below – attests.
Bale remembers Terminator Salvation as a career blip but doesn’t shy from reflecting on the experience. “I said no three times,” Bale revealed while discussing the role with Happy Sad Confused. “I thought that the franchise…I went, ‘Nah, there’s no story there.’ I’d seen the first one and enjoyed that back in England; I’d been to the movies and seen the second one.”
“It was an unfortunate series of events involving the writers’ strike, involving Jonah Nolan, who was able to come on and really start to write a wonderful script, but then got called away for a prior commitment that he had,” Bale explained. “And it’s a great thorn in my side because I wish we could have reinvigorated [the franchise]. And unfortunately, during production, you could tell that wasn’t happening. It’s a great shame.”
“There’s a perverse side to me, where people were telling me that there’s no way on God’s Earth that I should take that role, and I was thinking the same thing,” he continued. “But when people started verbalising that to me, I started to go, ‘Oh really? All right, well, watch this then.’ So there was a little bit of that involved in the choice.”
Later, Bale addressed his before-mentioned on-screen rant. When the director of photography wandered into the shot while cameras were rolling, Bale’s pent-up anger breached a dam as a tirade of expletives escaped him.
“That was a very unusual occasion,” Bale said. “Great learning lesson for me. Do you remember that scene with Linda Hamilton where she’s really going nuts in Terminator 2? We said, we’ve got to channel that at some point in the film, and that was the scene in which we were channelling it. Great lesson for me of: no matter how much you lose yourself in a scene, you do not allow yourself to behave that way. And yeah, of course, I’ve got enormous regrets about it”.
