Tough Batman star Christian Bale used to be an interviewer’s worst nightmare. Surly, monosyllabic and dodging all personal questions, his shell proved tougher to crack than the Caped Crusader’s Kevlar Batsuit.
When we last met, 18 months ago, he bristled and swore when I dared to ask how he got into character for a role. He snapped back: “I’m not on a couch having therapy!”
So imagine my surprise when I turn up at a Beverly Hills hotel to find Bale, 38, dressed in a sweater and slacks, smiling happily for photographers and actually cracking gags.
Can this be the same Christian Bale who was arrested for allegedly assaulting his mother and sister just four years ago? And is this the man whose foul-mouthed rant at a crew member who broke his concentration on the set of Terminator Salvation was immortalised on the internet?
It’s like finding that Batman’s arch-enemy The Joker is really Mr Nice Guy. But, as we sit down to chat about The Dark Knight Rises, his latest and final Batman movie - it soon becomes clear what is behind his own transformation.
Bale’s seven-year-old daughter, Emmaline, is clearly the apple of his eye, and he just can’t stop himself talking about her, his wife Sibi and the joys of being a dad.
“My daughter is crazy about art so we draw, paint and sculpt together,” he tells me proudly.
“She’s just nuts about it. And she has me dancing and singing to songs I never imagined I would be dancing and singing to. One of her favourites is LMFAO so I’m even doing that.“
“It’s a kick for her and her friends when I do the Batman voice for them and chase them around pretending to be Batman. Although she loves me doing the Batman voice she still takes the piss out of my British accent. I think past a certain age you can’t get rid of it no matter what you do,” he said. “My daughter loves it because she thinks it sounds so silly."
“She’s not really old enough to watch any of the movies so she hasn’t seen them yet. But she’s seen some pictures, she’d come and visit the set.”
In fact Bale makes sure Emmaline and Sibi – a former personal assistant to actress Winona Ryder, whom he married in Las Vegas in 2000 – go with him everywhere, including movie locations and on promotional tours.
“I believe in sticking together and that movies can produce experiences unlike any other job I could get,” he says. “Travel, strange, bizarre, wonderful experiences . . . I want my daughter to be a part of that and be along for the ride. My wife agrees. We want to all be together throughout it all.”
He says having a daughter has also made him realise the importance of strong, inspirational female role models. “It’s immensely important,” he says.
“I realise how few female singers I ever listened to before she was born and now I listen to an awful lot because I want her to know that she can do anything a man can do.”
Another great role model, he says, is Catwoman, played in The Dark Knight Rises by Anne Hathaway. He says: “We need more characters like her. We need more female figures who can kick butt and are intelligent as well.”
The Dark Knight Rises is the final movie in writer-director Chris Nolan’s Batman trilogy and marks the end of an era for Bale, who has lived with Bruce Wayne and his alter ego for the best part of a decade.
In another surprisingly personal revelation Bale explains how he took Batman’s iconic cowl as a souvenir when he left the set for the last time.
“It was a fairly low key-affair,” he says of the final day’s filming. I don’t like big goodbyes so I said goodbye to everybody fairly quickly and then sat in the outfit and the cowl for a good 20 minutes. I was just reflecting on what it had meant to me through the years.”
Bale’s Batman, who first surfaced in Batman Begins and returned in The Dark Knight, made him a star and enabled Nolan to write his own ticket in Hollywood.
It also provided lucrative work for cast regulars Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Gary Oldman.
But, Bale points out: “We were never arrogant enough to think we had the luxury of knowing we were going to make sequels.“
“Chris always stressed that each movie had to be independent and stand on its own because it could be the only one that we ever get to make.”
There was not much danger of that as the two previous Batman movies have brought in more than £900 million worldwide and generated hundreds of millions more in merchandise and licensing deals for Warner Bros.
The Dark Knight Rises, written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, begins eight years after The Dark Knight’s climax, when Batman took the blame for crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent’s crimes as Two-Face.
With Batman a reviled scapegoat, Bruce Wayne, his public face, is a bearded recluse hiding in his mansion still mourning the murder of his true love Rachel Dawes and needing to repair his troubled relationships with faithful butler Alfred (Michael Caine) and weapons and gadgets expert Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman). “He’s filled with remorse, he’s become a recluse, he’s given up and completely quit,” says Bale. “He’s in very poor health physically and mentally.”
Enter Batman’s mysterious adversaries, the femme fatale Catwoman and the brilliant and brutal terrorist Bane, played by Tom Hardy, who hides behind a menacing but medically necessary mask and is plotting a multi-pronged attack on Gotham City.
They and Police Commissioner Jim Gordon (Oldman) are enough to persuade Bruce Wayne, whose only superpower is his extraordinary wealth, to slip into his Batman cowl and return to crime fighting.
Two new faces in the cast are Marion Cotillard as the wealthy and beautiful Miranda Tate and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as young cop John Blake. Both actors previously worked with Nolan on his Oscar-winning movie, Inception.
The Dark Knight Rises was filmed over seven months in India, Glasgow, Pittsburgh, New York, Newark, Los Angeles and at a former RAF training airfield at Cardington in Bedfordshire.
Bale has had plenty of time to analyse Bruce Wayne/Batman over the years and has some firm ideas about the comic book character, created by the artist Bob Kane, who first appeared in Detective Comics #27 in 1939.
“He is not a healthy superhero,” he says. “He has multiple personality disorder and is a very sad, lonely individual. He has the public persona of the playboy and the character of Batman is the personification of his rage and sense of injustice.“
“He’s almost a villain and takes it to the edge where he can do great wrong but he has this altruism holding him back from doing that.“
“He dresses in the Batman suit because he feels monstrous and creates a monster to represent that rage and keep it away from his own personal life.“
“There are so many stories that can be written in that vein.“
“We could continue endlessly with this but Chris has written a wonderful final chapter and this is the right time to say goodbye.”
Bale is not sorry, however, to be leaving the world of big-budget film making behind. “I want to make some small movies now,” he says. “I’m looking at very different kinds of movies.”
So different, in fact, that his four next movies combined will cost less than half the £160m it took to make The Dark Knight Rises.
Born in South Wales, Bale grew up in Portugal and various towns around England before settling in Bournemouth.
Bale began his career when he was nine in British television commercials and made the transition to stage and film, performing alongside Rowan Atkinson in a West End production of The Nerd when he was 10 years old.
Then Steven Spielberg chose him from 4,000 hopefuls to star as young English boy Jim opposite John Malkovich and Miranda Richardon in the Second World War drama Empire of the Sun.
For a while after that he lost his desire to act and it was Kenneth Branagh who lured him back by persuading him to take a minor role in his Henry V.
As an adult he appeared in Disney's Newsies and Swing Kids and found himself labelled a heartthrob after his appearance in Little Women.
But it was not until he portrayed serial killer Patrick Bateman in 2000’s dark satire American Psycho that he made his breakthrough in the US.
He lost 80lbs for his role in the psychological thriller The Machinist and had to regain it all and more when he was cast as Batman.
He won the best supporting actor Oscar in 2011 for his role as ex-boxer Dicky Eklund in The Fighter.
The Batman films have given him the freedom to pick and choose the roles he wants, which he is relishing.
“Before Batman I would have these wonderful creative conversations with directors and writers and they’d always say, ‘I’d love you to make my movie.’ And then financiers would get involved and they’d say, ‘Don’t even mention Christian Bale to me. It’s not going to happen.' “Well, that’s changed and now I get to make movies that nobody would have cast me in previously.”
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~Laurie Believes~
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