The unlikely biopic Christian Bale would love to star in: “It’d be a lot of fun”
Christian Bale is such a brilliant actor that he makes all of his movies seem like biopics.
If it wasn’t for George Clooney’s take on Batman, I’d be convinced that Bruce Wayne was a real guy just from the strength of Bale’s performance. The Machinist? Totally believable. American Psycho? Fucked up, but yes, still believable. I’m even willing to believe that he is, in fact, a pair of twins as The Prestige suggests. If this is the case (you’re welcome to all the conspiracy theorists out there for doing your work for you), the Bales are unmatched, except by each other.
If we are forced to exist in the realm of cold, hard facts, though, it is still true that Mr Bale is something of a biopic specialist. He’s played drug addicted boxers and neurodivergent hedge fund managers, Dick Cheney and Bob Dylan. He’s able to do all this because he’s the real deal. He is both willing to take his body to the absolute maximum and (unlike Jared Leto) follow through with decent acting.
Sadly for Bale, however, the one real-life person he’d like to play is not physically possible due to that most pesky of realities: age. In 2022, the Oscar winner revealed that he’s always wanted to play Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder. “He was always such an interesting figure,” he said. “I grew up loving the Happy Mondays, so yeah, it’d be a lot of fun to play.” However, he conceded that he’s probably too old at this point to play the Mancunian, at least if the film were to take place during the peak of his career.
This is unfortunate, because even though Bale can play just about anyone, he would be especially amazing as Ryder. The Madchester pioneer had a made-for-Hollywood story arc, starting as a working-class teenager scraping by on construction jobs only to become one of the UK’s most talked-about frontmen of the late 1980s and early ‘90s.
After shaking off his heroin addiction in the early 2000s, he even found the proverbial light by way of UFO sightings and cycling. As if that weren’t enough, one look at him in the early ‘90s and you’ll notice that he actually looks a lot like Bale, at least when the actor was the same age.
The ship may have sailed on a 1990s-era biopic starring the American Psycho actor, but there is a niche alternative that I’d like to send out into the universe as a pop culture prayer. In 2013, Ryder starred in a reality series called Shaun Ryder on UFOs in which he travelled around the world to uncover evidence of extraterrestrial life. It wasn’t a publicity stunt – he’s believed in aliens for decades, ever since he saw a spaceship over Salford in the ‘70s.
For some reason, Shaun Ryder on UFOs never won an Emmy, and it didn’t get renewed. In other words, more than a decade later, it is more than due for its Hollywood rehashing, and what better way to do it than to make a fictionalised, behind-the-scenes movie about it starring Bale as Ryder?
This hits many birds with one stone, and it’s high time someone seized the opportunity.
