The surprising movie Christian Bale called “as satisfying as anything else I’ve ever done”
For Christian Bale, both luck and immense talent have allowed him to become one of Hollywood’s most well-respected actors. With no official acting training, Bale appeared in several adverts and theatre productions as a child, leading him to a television film that connected him with Amy Irving, an actor who also happened to be married to Steven Spielberg.
As a result, Bale was cast in the legendary director’s upcoming film, 1987’s Empire of the Sun, and subsequently earned acclaim for his performance. The actor, who was just 13 at the time, seemed like he was destined for success, but it would take him a few more years to actually get there. He starred in a few strong roles during the mid-1990s, like Portrait of a Lady, Little Women and even Pocahontas, before rising to widespread fame with American Psycho in 2000.
From that point onwards, he was consistently booking roles that would earn him immense success, and he even gained a reputation for his method acting choices. From The Machinist to The Dark Knight trilogy, American Hustle, The Fighter and Ford V Ferrari, Bale has cemented himself as a mainstay in both mainstream and indie cinema.
In 2022, he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe, playing Gorr the God Butcher in Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder. There is much discussion surrounding the MCU, with some filmmakers, such as Martin Scorsese, considering it a disservice to cinema.
The spectacle of many MCU films, which often become more of a brand than a piece of art, has angered many cinephiles and acclaimed directors. The MCU brings incredible amounts of money in, however, and with Waititi at the helm of Thor: Love and Thunder, some people hoped that the movie would be a little different.
The film received mixed critical reviews, but that didn’t stop it from grossing hundreds of millions. Regardless of some of the criticism Bale received for deciding to appear in a Marvel movie, he found the role highly enjoyable. For Bale, the chance to play a villain was exciting, an archetype he has excelled at in the past.
“Oh, I love it. It’s as satisfying as anything else I’ve ever done,” he told Sharp Magazine. “There’s no hierarchy in my mind of good and lesser roles. There are efforts that went wrong. There were certainly films I look back on and go, ‘Wah, that didn’t work.’ But, you know, an audience member might feel different and in my mind, as soon as a film is made, whatever the viewer thinks of it, that’s right.”
Bale loved filming Thor: Love and Thunder, which allowed him to experience a different kind of movie set, and that’s all that really mattered to him. “I had a wonderful time on this. It was not only very, very unique and new blue screens, digital stuff that I’ve never dealt with before in my life. But also just personally, a really wonderful experience, coming out of lockdown, and it was a very family friendly set.”
