The mark that Christian Bale left as Batman with The Dark Knight trilogy is arguably unbeatable. It is not everyone’s cup of tea to convincingly play a double role as an eccentric billionaire by day and a masked bat crusader by night. Critics were wowed by his brilliant performance in Batman Begins, only to be blown away by the subsequent sequels.
From eating junk food in order to gain weight for the role to performing as many stunts as he could himself, Christian Bale gave the role everything he had. It just goes on to say that he was super passionate about playing the Caped Crusader. So passionate, that he even almost lost his accent while doing promotions for it. Talk about dedication, right?
Christian Bale Didn’t Want an English Batman
Appearing for an interview with Black Film back in June 2005, Christian Bale talked about how Batman is an American icon and that he wanted to keep it that way. Even though Bale himself is British, his American accent wasn’t hard to believe at all. He stated that whenever he looked at his work as Bruce Wayne aka Batman, he wouldn’t “see anything British about it.” The actor continued that America was his adopted home.
When the interviewer stated that Bale seemed to have lost his British accent thanks to his work in Hollywood, the actor stated,
“Right now I did another movie. I finished doing that, it was called ‘Harsh Times’ and I just felt that when I’m not thinking about it I can hear a slight Englishness coming into it.”
However, when it comes to playing Batman, Bale believed that the superhero was such an American character, that even during promotions and interviews he didn’t want to bring out his British accent. He simply didn’t want people to get confused.
“But I just feel that Batman is such an American character that in representing him, in doing the interviews, I don’t want to be sounding English because that would be peculiar. I would expect people to be saying ‘What the hell is going on? Why do we have an English Batman?’”
While there have been many British actors who have played American characters, and will continue to do so, the trend had to begin somewhere, right? Well, as far as actor Gary Oldman is concerned, Christopher Nolan, the director of The Dark Knight trilogy was responsible for the trend. He stated that it takes someone with an imagination like that of Nolan’s to pull something like this off. He’s not wrong. Nolan trusting Bale to do the job certainly paid off!
Christian Bale was Obsessed with Batman
Bale was never into comic books, which is rather strange given the fact that he was once the face of one of the most iconic comic characters out there. However, that changed when he was given Arkham Asylum to read. He then went on to read more comic books with the superhero and that’s when he realized he wanted to play Batman.
“So that’s when I first thought to myself, ‘I really want to play this character.’ I had not seen him done and contacted my agent and said, ‘Can you just keep your eyes out, keep your eyes peeled if they are ever going to be doing a different Batman and if it’s ever going to be in this style.’ Then hearing that Chris Nolan had been brought on was an obvious indication that the studio didn’t want to go back and do the same old as before… By the time I actually came to be cast I kind of gotten so obsessed about it that I kind of viewed it as it being mine already. It would’ve been more like…if they had told me like ‘No it’s not yours’. I would’ve been like, ‘No way that’s not working out, that’s not going to happen.”
Bale’s sudden obsession with the character certainly led to great things happening in the cinema. The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises are two of the most financially successful films of Bale’s career. Even today, those films are the standard of superhero films and it’s not everyone’s cup of tea to match the standard as the bar has been set quite high!
You can stream Christian Bale’s run as Batman on HBO Max.
Source: Black Film
