Hank Williams: The “emaciated” musician who inspired Christian Bale
While the performances of Christian Bale owe their excellence to his undoubted dramatic talents, there’s another facet of the English actor that makes his on screen efforts so believable. The truth is that Bale has proven time and time again that he is committed to go to great lengths in order to assume the proper physical qualities of his characters.
For instance, when taking on the role of Batman in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy, Bale hit the gym hard and got absolutely ripped in order to play the Caped Crusader. Then, when preparing to portray Dick Cheney in Vice, Bale had to hit the cheeseburgers and not the gym, so he could appear in a slightly podgier guise.
However, even though those performances saw Bale take his body shape in different directions, there are few actors who showed the same willingness for physical transformation as Bale when he starred in Brad Anderson’s 2004 psychological thriller The Machinist, undoubtedly one of Bale’s best-ever turns.
Bale played Trevor Reznik, the titular machinist operator who suffers from serious paranoia and insanity after failing to sleep for a whole year. To get into ‘shape’ for his role, Bale ended up losing 28kg and by the time he arrived on set ready to film, he was about as frail as possible with his bones showing through his skin.
Speaking with the BBC, Bale once pointed out how he had gone about losing the weight and why he felt that starving himself was the only feasible method. “It just didn’t enter my head that it could be done any other way, really,” the actor said. “I just realised, ‘Okay, I have to lose weight.’ I just had no idea how much I would have to lose in order to get the look that I was searching for.”
However, in preparing to lose weight for The Machinist, Bale consulted an image of a legendary American singer-songwriter who had also assumed a shockingly skinny physical appearance. Hank Williams died at the age of 29 after suffering heart failure as a result of years of alcoholism and prescription drug abuse.
Speaking of how Williams inspired Bale, the actor noted: “I had a photograph of Hank Williams when he was only 29, but he was looking like he was coming on 50, I guess just from abuse. It was a photograph of him getting released from jail just a few months before he died. He’s shirtless, and he looks a wreck, absolutely emaciated.”
To always have Williams in mind as he was coming towards the shoot of The Machinist, Bale stuck the photo of the musician on the front of the film’s script so he could always remember what his character should look like. Even so, Bale still had to do the hard work of starving himself in order to look like Williams at the end of his life (he died at 29), but he said that he just “kept going and going”.
Hank Williams’ death was a tragedy and a true loss of musical talent, and he’s not the first person we think would inspire Christian Bale. However, inspiration often comes from the unlikeliest sources, and when Bale delivered his shocking and brilliant performance as Trevor Reznik, he would always have Williams to thank in a very sick and saddening way.
