Bale gives a weighty performance

Christian Bale
Christian Bale
''He is a brilliant con artist, OK?'' Christian Bale says of Irving Rosenfeld, the character he plays in American Hustle.

''But, really, who is he conning with that hair?''

The actor has a point. In David O. Russell's disco-era ensemble piece, loosely based on the late-'70s Abscam scandal and ace scammer Melvin Weinberg, recruited by the FBI to take down money-hungry politicians, it's hard at first to figure out how Bale's character pulls it off. With that hairpiece, that is.

In the film's opening scene, Bale's Irv is gingerly applying spirit gum, trying to stick a not-exactly-top-quality toupee to his head. When the camera pulls back, we see a guy of considerable girth. Bale, famous for shedding weight (25kg-plus for The Machinist), gained almost 20kg to, er, embody Irv.

''When I first read the script by Eric Singer, which was a wonderful script, a historical drama,'' Bale says, ''in my mind's eye I had pictured that Mel was probably a real smooth operator. Somebody very slick, very suave, giving the impression of being very moneyed, very erudite. And then when I saw a picture and I saw interviews with Mel, he was not any of those things.

''And I just found him mesmerising and surprising and I said, 'OK, how did he, from the inside out, become that way?' ... and from that moment I was just obsessed ... I thought, I can't play this guy any other way. And especially with something like that comb-over ... I loved that contradiction.''

Bale threw Russell for a loop, too, when the actor showed up for the first day of shooting with what cannot accurately be described as a beer belly, it's more like a whole brewery. But it works, gloriously.

Bale, who won the best supporting actor Oscar in 2011 for his performance as crack-addled former welterweight champ Dicky Eklund in The Fighter, is famous for his total-immersion approach. He kept hours of recordings on his iPhone of his real-life American Hustle counterpart, Weinberg, playing them en route to the set, and between scenes, to nail the outer-borough cadences and crackling banter.

And, of course, Bale stopped going to the gym, and started eating, a lot.

His regimen? ''I sat on my arse and ate doughnuts,'' says the Welsh born, LA-based actor, star of Christopher Nolan's brooding Batman/Dark Knight trilogy. Gaining weight, he reports, is far easier than losing it.

''It is incredibly easy for the first couple of weeks. No, I should say it's incredibly enjoyable for the first couple of weeks. Putting on weight is easy all the way through,'' he says.

''But after the first couple of weeks, the novelty wears off very quickly, and your body is groaning and starting to really shout at you, saying, 'Why? Why? Why? Why are you doing this?'

''So, it actually stopped being enjoyable much more quickly than I realised.

''But easy? Yes.''

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