The Christian Bale performance that made the crew quit
Christian Bale has certainly never shied away from playing challenging roles. He’s beefed up to take on the role of the caped crusader, piled on the pounds to play the power-hungry Dick Cheney, and lost a shocking amount of weight until he became skeletal for The Machinist. These kinds of dramatic body transformations seem to have captured the attention of the Hollywood publicity machine when a new film is being promoted, but looking past the physical dedication Bale pays to his roles, he’s also a tremendous character actor who relishes playing difficult roles. However, there is one iconic role the actor played that was by far the most controversial of his entire career.
In 1991, Bret Easton Ellis published his post-modern classic, American Psycho, the darkly comedic, ultra-violent, and disturbing tale of Patrick Bateman, a vain, shallow, and narcissistic investment banker with a ritualistic workout and cosmetic routine who is also a cannibalistic serial killer. The book was hugely successful and hugely controversial upon its release. Critics praised its takedown of capitalist culture and ideology, while activists opposed the graphic violence that happens towards women.
The novel was adapted into a feature film in 2000, with Mary Harron brought on board to direct. Initially, Leonardo DiCaprio was cast to take the lead role but later pulled out, presumably because of the controversial nature of the premise, and so Bale was cast as Patrick Bateman. Talking to GQ, Bale shared his determination to land the role, “I mean, they had Leonardo DiCaprio all primed for it, but I just kept rehearsing, training and preparing,” he said. “People would look at me sort of worryingly, and I’d stare them in the face and say, ‘Listen, I am definitely making this movie.’”
What Harron and screenwriter Guinevere Turner bring to the film is a sharp and refined sense of character and drawing out the comedy from within the book. However, I’m sure having a female writer and director attached would help squash the backlash against the film’s misogynistic themes, something that Easton Ellis’ book suffered from. Bateman’s deranged, rambling, and almost pornographic first-person monologues about restaurants, albums, films, and cosmetic routines within the book are astutely channelled by Harron and Turner into the darkly comic narration and montages on screen.
A great example of this is the now iconic scene in which Bateman and his yuppie co-workers try to impress each other with their business cards. The thickness of the paper, the font type, and the ink colour are tremendously crucial to the group, and to get the balance wrong would be a stain on your character. When one of Bateman’s colleagues reveals his new business card that is better than everyone else’s, Bateman breaks out in a cold sweat, his narration brilliantly capturing his utter despair at knowing someone has a more tasteful business card than his own.
According to Bale, the laughs were not just within the script but also on set, for the most part. “It was a blast. The crew were busted up laughing most of the time,” Bale said. However, some of the crew did, in fact, quit during the shoot owing to the controversial nature of the story. “I mean, there were a few crew members whose wives made them quit,” Bale said. “But for those who thought we were really psychotic misogynists, most of the crew were women, for Christ’s sake – the director, screenwriters, script supervisor”.
The controversy surrounding American Psycho reared its head on the film’s release, creating a public buzz that helped at the box office takings. Interestingly, one of the most vocal opposers of the film was the feminist activist Gloria Steinem, who found many of the themes and scenes of Bateman inflicting violence on women problematic, but she also happens to be Christian Bale’s stepmother. American Psycho still feels as shockingly fresh and exciting as it did all those years ago, a testament to Harron, Turner, and Easton Ellis’ brilliant effort, and it will also go down as one of Bale’s greatest screen performances – albeit controversially.
