“Please, God, let me off this!”: Why Christian Bale once begged to be fired from a movie
As we know from his particularly shouty episode some years back on the set of Terminator Salvation, Christian Bale is an actor who isn’t afraid to express his emotions on a film set, to put it mildly.
Back then, in 2009, he famously bawled out the director of photography Shane Hurlbut for some three minutes for inadvertently walking in his eyeline while Bale was performing something of an emotional scene, which, unfortunately for the star, led to the audio being broadcast to the internet.
Bale went into full meltdown mode, threatening to trash all the lights and saying that he would quit the movie if Hurlbut wasn’t immediately fired. Neither of these things happened in the end, and the actor did issue a public apology, although interestingly not to Harlbut, and one wonders whether he would have apologised had the tape not been made public.
Either way, he certainly sounded pretty contrite for it all, saying, “I was out of order beyond belief. I make no excuses for it”.
He didn’t make any apologies for how bad Terminator Salvation was, but that’s another thing altogether. He blamed his outburst for being too ‘in character’, and his immersion into his roles certainly can’t be questioned; anyone who lives on just an apple and a tin of tuna a day, like he did for losing five stones for The Machinist, can’t really have their commitment questioned.
But what happens when Bale takes on a role and then decides he’s made a big mistake and wants out as soon as possible? Has that happened? Turns out it has indeed, and when GQ asked him a few years back if he’d ever said yes to something and then said no, he replied, “I’ve pleaded to get fired! I’ve asked for that, and they wouldn’t. I had somebody ask me that the other day. He said, ‘How many people have you ever had fired?’ I said, ‘No one. I’m not in a position to fire anybody’. I don’t know if I could anyway. I’d just feel so bad. No, producers do that. But I said, ‘I’ve asked.’ I’ve asked the producers, ‘Please, God, let me off this!’”
Sadly, he wouldn’t be pushed on exactly which movie set that might have been, but it seems he has calmed down a lot in the 17 years or so since his Terminator tantrum, or at least if he’s had a go at anyone since it hasn’t made the press. If that was going to happen, you’d imagine it could well have been on the set of his latest film, the Maggie Gyllenhaal-directed The Bride, for which he had to sit in a make-up chair for six hours a day in order to transform into Frankenstein’s monster.
Bale said that in order to stop himself from going insane after sitting still for that long at a time, he would scream like crazy every day, but hopefully not within earshot of any directors of photography. In fact, it sounds like the crew on the set of The Bride were actually more than alright with his hollering, as he would make it something of a communal experience where lots of people could all scream cathartically together, which sounds like a complete nightmare to be honest.
Next up, he is going to be seen opposite Nicolas Cage, who is also very good at shouting, in Madden, the story of the legendary American football coach John Madden. Bale will play Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders, who hired Madden to become the youngest NFL head coach in history.
