The typo that pushed Christian Bale’s method acting to the extreme: “No, don’t change the weights”
There’s lots of noise in the news at the moment about weight-loss pills now that they’re on the market in the UK, and while it obviously makes sense for some people, they could always go a much cheaper and easier route and just do what Christian Bale did when he made The Machinist in 2004.
OK, so technically Bale’s regime of black coffee, an apple and a tin of tuna a day might be ‘dangerous and unsustainable’, but hey, it lost him 60 pounds, or about four stone for those of us that still use such measurements, and while it left him looking completely emaciated and ill, you can’t argue with results like that.
But perhaps the most surprising thing about the psychological thriller, which is actually a superb film if you haven’t seen it, is that Bale didn’t even need to go through that kind of physical torment in the first place if his co-star on the movie is to be believed.
Apparently, according to Michael Ironside, he of Total Recall and Starship Troopers fame, the writer of The Machinist, Scott Kosar, had actually written the part of insomnia sufferer Trevor Reznick for someone much shorter than Bale, but hadn’t adjusted the description of the character’s weight in the script to reflect the actor being six-feet tall.
As Ironside explained to HuffPost: “The writer is only about five-foot-six, and he put his own weights in. And then Chris did the film and Chris said, ‘No, don’t change the weights. I want to see if I make them.’ … So those weights he writes on the bathroom wall in the film are his actual weights in the film.”
Bale’s weight loss for the movie was genuinely alarming. Over the course of four months, he dropped his weight from 182 to 120 pounds, and wanted to go further down to 99 pounds before the filmmakers had to step in and stop him over concerns for his health.
Once the actor was done with the film, which tells the tale of a machine operator who begins to experience paranoid hallucinations after not sleeping properly for a year, he had just six weeks to try to put as much weight and muscle back on as possible, with filming due to start on Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins.
It was probably worth Bale’s effort in the long run, though, because his dedicated performance attracted widespread praise, and the film made a reasonable profit at the box office on its way to becoming something of a cult favourite.
Meanwhile, Bale started this year off with something of a disappointment as Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! was roundly panned, but he’ll be looking to bounce back with his David O Russell-directed American football biopic Madden alongside Nicolas Cage, which is due out at the end of November.
He’s also rumoured to be involved in the long-awaited sequel to Michael Mann’s 1995 thriller Heat, which is slated to feature Leonardo DiCaprio, Stephen Graham and Adam Driver, but isn’t likely to be released before 2028. Finally, he is working on a drama called The Church of Living Dangerously, which tells the story of how one of America’s most respected pastors ended up as a drug runner for the Mexican cartel.
