The genre Christian Bale wants nothing to do with: “I thought they’d lost their minds”
Christian Bale is considered one of the most dynamic actors of the 21st century, if not of all time.
Over the years, he has been praised for his ability to pile on and then shed off the pounds in a very literal take on method acting; he’s often mistaken for American, despite being British, given his aptitude with accents, and he bounces from genre to genre.
He might be best known for playing complex, brooding men, especially in the thriller, action and crime genres, but he’s much more than just an action star. In Velvet Goldmine, he proved he could play a gay journalist in a musical drama; in American Psycho, he showed his physical comedy chops as murderous, metrosexual investment banker Patrick Bateman and in Exodus: Gods and Kings, he got biblical as Moses. He’s done horror, he’s done comedy, and he’s done historical and period.
But there’s a genre that’s seriously lacking in his oeuvre: the romantic comedy. OK, sure, he’s a “serious actor”, and the belief is that serious actors don’t get taken seriously by doing rom-coms. But that’s not always the case. Phillip Seymour-Hoffman starred in Along Came Polly; Gary Oldman did the absolutely ridiculous Tiptoes; even Daniel Day-Lewis did My Beautiful Laundrette. And Bale’s Dark Knight Rises co-star Heath Ledger made his career off the genre.
But Bale is uncompromising in his opinion on the rom-com and wants nothing to do with it. When asked by The Guardian whether he’d considered the genre, he responded with a question of his own, “Have you ever enjoyed a romantic comedy?” Apparently, even the genre blueprint, When Harry Met Sally, wasn’t a good enough answer.
“I was asked to do a romantic comedy recently, and I thought they’d lost their minds. Cats have those insane half hours every evening. I think it must have been that for the production company,” he explained. To be fair to him, it’s pretty difficult to imagine him as a kind-hearted, love-lost leading man learning the error of his ways to find the woman of his dreams and have her fall in love with him.
The actor seems much more comfortable with maniacs and murderers. It’s even easier to imagine him as some sort of campy drag queen or vulnerable gay man in some historical drama or the like than it is as an earnest heterosexual love interest. Although surely he has the range and the experience, he has been married for 25 years.
But with all this contempt for the romantic comedy, something seems to be lost on everyone involved. Technically, Bale has already starred in a rom-com: the 1999 adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Featuring alongside Michelle Pfeiffer, Stanley Tucci and Rupert Everett, Bale played Demetrius in a very frilly, 1990s-does-the-1890s iteration of the famous play. Yes, it’s Shakespeare, but it’s still a rom-com; some might say it’s the original romantic comedy.
So, his point really is moot. He might not have a desire to visit the genre, but he has already been there at the peak of its powers, and there’s no way to undo it, unless he manages to employ the work of some of Oberon’s magic flowers.
