Many considered Christian Bale’s American Psycho role a courageous and bold move on his part. Many of his friends even warned the actor to not appear in the film warning that the film could be his career suicide.
There was a whole drama behind the casting as well when the director and the studio were not in line with choosing the actor to play Patrick Bateman. On one hand, the studio wanted Leonardo DiCaprio while on the other hand, the director Mary Harron was rooting for Bale.
Christian Bale Received Multiple Cautionary Career Suicide Warnings for American Psycho
Not just for Christian Bale, but even for Lionsgate Films, it was a tough call to make a movie on Bret Easton Ellis’ disturbingly graphic narrative published in 1991 which meet with instant controversy. Reflecting on the ’80s yuppie culture, the novel was filled with extreme violence in possession of a satirical tone directed towards consumerism, and toxic masculinity.
Now, the question was who would be able to pull off Patrick Bateman? Lionsgate was more interested in Leonardo DiCaprio and even offered him a whopping $20 million for the role. However, The Revenant actor rejected the role. “Leonardo wasn’t remotely right [for the part]. There’s something very boyish about him,” director Mary Harron once said.
“He’s not credible as one of these tough Wall Street guys… I did not want to deal with someone who had a 13-year-old fan base. They shouldn’t see the movie. It could’ve gotten us in a lot of trouble.”
When Harron got her desired actor for the role, the duo went on to shape one of the greatest characters in modern Hollywood. But Patrick Bateman was never easy, in fact, Bale has constantly received cautionary warnings of career suicide when he was a rising star.
“I had an awful lot of calls saying it was going to be career suicide … a lot of people would talk about Anthony Perkins in ‘Psycho’ and say once you play a villain like that you never get to play anything else, because you’re stuck in everyone’s imagination as that person,” Bale recalled.
Also, it was a role Bale had his eyes on which happened because of the persistent effort of Harron. “She really threw herself on the sword for me. I will always appreciate that, so much,” Bale once said. The movie worked, and despite moderate collection at the box office American Psycho went on to become one of the iconic movies of the decade.
Why did American Psycho Co-stars Hate Christian Bale?
Bale’s portrayal of Patrick Bateman was terrifying. The actor himself admitted that “He’s certainly not somebody that I would want to be at a table eating with, but I’d certainly want to eavesdrop on his conversation.” But his offscreen presence was not any less terrifying for his co-stars. Talking to MovieMaker, The Dark Knight actor revealed that his co-stars in American Psycho hated him which was later revealed by Josh Lucas. “Josh Lucas and I did a film together recently, and he opened my eyes to something that I had been unaware of,” Bale said.
“He informed me that all of the other actors thought that I was the worst actor they’d ever seen. He was telling me they kept looking at me and talking about me, saying, ‘Why did Mary fight for this guy? He’s terrible.’ And it wasn’t until he saw the film that he changed his mind. And I was in the dark completely about that critique”.
Bale’s co-star Chloë Sevigny also opened up about the hard time working with Bale in the film. “Working with Christian was pretty hard because I didn’t know this whole Method thing,” she told MovieMaker once.
“I was pretty fresh. I hadn’t done that many films before, and that an actor would lose himself to such a degree and was so consumed by the part, I was having a hard time kind of… just wanting to socialise with him, but feeling that he didn’t, and then my ego being like, Does he not like me? Does he think I’m a terrible actress?” she added.
There is no secret about Bale’s methodical approach to acting. He is also known for extreme physical transformation in movie roles. Perhaps, his extreme take on the character even behind the scene shaped the best version of the psychotic villain.
Source: SlashFilm.
