Ugly CGI: The movie role Christian Bale was worried would make him look “foolish”
Cynics would say that Hollywood actors are in the business of looking foolish, and this is partly true. After all, once you place an actor pretending to swing around the streets of New York City dressed as a spider out of context, things start looking a little silly. But, the industry calls for such tomfoolery, with acclaimed Oscar winners like Robert Downey Jr, Halle Berry, and Christian Bale having donned superhero suits over the years.
A performing chameleon of many talents, Bale has long been praised for his method acting style, which sees him change his body for his most dramatically challenging roles. Such body transformations include the time he lost 30 pounds for his Oscar-winning turn in David O.Russell’s 2010 film The Fighter, as well as the more commercial role he took up as Batman in Christopher Nolan’s movie trilogy, bulking up considerably before he donned the Dark Knight cape.
Celebrated across the world, the Dark Knight Batman trilogy contains three of the best superhero movies ever made, with Bale being the lynchpin of the series alongside the variety of superb character actors who play his characters’ adversaries. Still, even as one of the coolest superheroes, there remain many scenes when the violent vigilante looks a little goofy in his cute rubber suit.
However, it seems as though Bale was less bothered by how he looked like Batman than earlier in his career when he was still trying to get his career started as an actor. Just like many of his acting peers, Bale was careful when choosing which roles to take on, fearing that one wrong move could condemn him to the depths of industry purgatory, where studios banish stars they would rather not take financial risks on.
This fear was expressed in an interview Bale took part in with Phase 9 while he was promoting the abysmal 2002 film Reign of Fire, a high-budget fantasy flick that tells the story of fire-breathing dragons setting about to demolish and set ablaze seemingly every city across the globe. Co-starring Matthew McConaughey and Gerard Butler, at least the film was a flop for more people than just Bale.
“My initial thoughts were that it could have become a special effects project rather than an acting project,” Bale told the publication when explaining why he took on the film in the first place, “I was a fan of mythology, through books mainly. I really liked Clash Of The Titans as a kid. These kinds of movies tend to be B- movies, and you can enjoy that”.
Continuing, he explained: “I worried that it might end up with the people in it looking a little bit foolish. Also there is how the dragons are going to look. CGI is an incredible thing, but I’ve seen them use it disastrously many times before…I’m always also kind of attracted by movies where there is a real challenge and a real possibility of it going really badly wrong”.
Bale did, indeed, look very foolish in the film and has done so in several other movies since then, but such is the joy of cinema: frolicking around in barmy costumes against green-screen nothingness for the entertainment of viewers. Perfection.
