Why Timothée Chalamet’s worst-ever audition was technically Christian Bale’s fault
Every actor has a couple of audition horror stories in their past, even A-list stars who now have the world at their feet. Timothée Chalamet‘s worst audition, for example, was so embarrassing that it made him wish the ground would open up and swallow him.
Auditions are a necessary evil in any actor’s journey, especially in the early stages of their career. However, they are easily one of the most nerve-wracking experiences any performer can be subjected to, and the amount of angst, uncertainty, and rejection surrounding most auditions can often break an actor’s spirit.
There are a myriad of things that can go wrong during an audition, from minor hiccups to abject disasters. Maybe an actor flubs their lines in front of the casting director because anxiety got the best of them. Maybe they’re late for the audition in the first place, or they’re thrown a curveball and aren’t prepared enough to roll with it.
When it comes to Chalamet’s most humiliating audition, though, his mistake wasn’t so much a missed line or a lack of preparation. Instead, he completely misunderstood the character he was reading for, so his performance made no sense in the audition’s context. In the end, all he could do was passively blame Christian Bale. Allow me to explain.
Chalamet’s tale of woe began when he nabbed an audition for the lead role in A&E’s Bates Motel, which premiered in 2013. When he read for the part of the teenage Norman Bates, he was only 14 or 15 years old, and the only thing he was told about the role was that it was “a young Psycho“.
As a young man who liked being prepared, Chalamet immediately went to Netflix and typed in ‘Psycho.’ He soon found himself watching Christian Bale as ’80s businessman/potential serial killer Patrick Bateman, and began pondering how he would portray that character as a teen.
Obviously, most cinephiles of a certain age will be reading this description of Chalamet’s process and cringing because they know exactly where he went wrong. Of course, Bates Motel was a prequel show to Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 thriller Psycho, not Bale’s satirical 2000 black comedy horror American Psycho, which Mary Harron directed.
In hindsight, Chalamet probably should’ve checked with his parents to make sure he was channelling the right psychopath, but it’s perfectly understandable that he wasn’t au fait with a movie that came out 35 years before he was born.
In the end, Chalamet strolled into his audition thinking he had it all figured out, and gave his best rendition of the vain, narcissistic, and unhinged Bateman as he imagined him in his teen years. Naturally, the casting people were baffled because they expected him to evoke the outwardly timid, repressed Bates. When Chalamet realised his mistake, he was mortified.
Thankfully, in 2020, the young star was able to see the funny side of his faux pas, telling Backstage magazine that his take on the material was “obviously very specific tonally and performance-wise.” He even revealed that there is probably footage of his misguided audition floating around the internet somewhere, which means legions of his fans have likely already chuckled at his “Patrick Bateman impression that’s way off tonally.”
But hey, you win some, you lose some. And it was all Bale’s fault, anyway.
