It’s Monday afternoon and Christian Bale, god of acting, is on the phone from his Los Angeles home, where he’s "doing s*** around the house," he says matter-of-factly.
"I’m a dad, so lots of unexpected running around and all of that," says the Oscar winner and father of two, his thick Welsh accent as hearty as the laughter that frequently breaks up his sentences. As intense or intimidating as you might think he’d be, he’s a conversational, engaging chat.
Bale says he’s recently found himself immersed in the world of manga art — not for a role, but because one of his children is dabbling in it. He says he’s constantly learning from his children, ages 7 and 17, while also trying to protect and shelter them from the horrors of the wider world.
"It’s a slightly nerve-wracking place, as a father, to look at and consider the decades to come," Bale says, adding he’s confronted with the same "3am terrors I’m finding lots of people are having right now". He doesn’t feel immortal — "I had that pass a few decades ago," he says — and he’s concerned with the rate at which things seem to be speeding towards oblivion, be it climate-wise, politically or just in terms of general societal breakdown.
"None of the bad things are happening more slowly than anyone expected, they are all happening more quickly, aren’t they?" he says.
Those fears helped lead him to Burt Berendsen, the character Bale plays in his new movie, Amsterdam. Berendsen is a wide-eyed optimist who, despite losing an eye in World War I, retains a preternaturally sunny worldview, and along with a couple of friends and a wily cast of characters he helps to thwart an attempted fascist US takeover.
Berendsen’s outlook, and Bale’s desire to be more like him, is what led to him creating the character along with director David O. Russell, who directed Bale to his Oscar win in 2010’s The Fighter. The pair also collaborated on 2013’s American Hustle.
They’ve been working on Amsterdam together for six years, going back and forth with character bits and story notes from the ground up. (The project marks Bale’s debut as a producer.) It’s Russell’s first movie since 2015 and it features an ensemble cast that also includes Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rami Malek, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Alessandro Nivola, Timothy Olyphant, Zoe Saldana, Robert De Niro and Taylor Swift.
Bale says Berendsen has become his guru of sorts, and he casually refers to him as a friend.
"I ask myself, ‘what would Burt do?’ It’s become quite a good test," says Bale, 48. "If I’m having a bad day, I go visit with Burt for a little bit." He pauses. "You know I’m an actor, so I can talk like that and no-one bats an eyelid. That’s the great thing about playing dress-up for a living. You can be bats*** crazy and that’s just the norm."
Bale has been acting for 40 years. He was born in a smallish town in Wales, the youngest of three (he has two older sisters), and was raised in England. He started appearing in commercials at age 8 and by 13 he was playing the lead in Steven Spielberg’s coming-of-age World War2 epic Empire of the Sun.
He didn’t set out to be an actor, he was put to work at an early age to help out with the family bills. That’s the sad side of things, Bale says.
But he found his way through acting, and he has come to be respected as one of Hollywood’s leading actors, known for his on-screen intensity and his commitment to craft.
He has made almost 50 films, and has managed to balance blockbuster material (he starred as Batman in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy, which grossed more than $US2.4 billion worldwide) and smaller films with remarkable ease, while working with top-notch directors such as Michael Mann (Public Enemies), Ridley Scott (Exodus: Gods and Kings) and Terrence Malick (The New World). In addition to his Oscar win, he has three additional Academy Award nominations (for American Hustle and his two Adam McKay collaborations The Big Short and Vice).
His career has afforded him "a life that I never would have imagined," he says.
Not only is the work "incredibly enjoyable," he says, but it’s helped him gain a better understanding of the world around him.
"It’s actually meaningful, and it really does come to be informative to somebody like myself who has no idea about people and never reads the room correctly," says Bale, who has been married to his wife, Sibi Blazic, for 22 years. "I put my foot in my mouth an awful lot, and people completely confuse and confound me. And so it’s endlessly confusing but enjoyably confusing, and I am very grateful that I still get to do it after all of these years. It’s allowed me to to pay off my house, which is the only thing I ever wanted to do."
Now, about that habit of putting his foot in his mouth: in discussing Amsterdam, which is best described as a movie for grown-ups, Bale says the intended audience isn’t free to just go to the movies whenever they please.
"The problem is adults have kids and you can’t just whimsically jump up and go see a film very often. So therein lies the problem, right?" he says.
A moment later, he realises the subtext of his argument. "Children! Children are the problem, children are the reason cinema is dying!" he says, having a laugh at his own expense. "Well, there you go."
But he does worry, "post-pandemic and post-cozy couches and phenomenal TVs," that we’re in the "dying days" of the theatrical experience, especially with regard to a film such as Amsterdam, which doesn’t feature anyone with superpowers or anyone in a cape.
Bale has no problem with the Marvel machine — he played the villain role in Thor: Love and Thunder — and he’s not averse to working with streamers, as evidenced by his upcoming The Pale Blue Eye, which is scheduled to have a small theatrical window in December before migrating to Netflix in January. It’s his first film made for a major streaming studio.
But he knows the ritual of moviegoing, the act of sitting down in a theatre with a room full of strangers and experiencing something together, is in danger of slipping away. And that concerns him, both in terms of Hollywood’s bottom line and what it means in a larger social context.
"How do you get people to keep on going out to the movie theatres? The hope is love of your fellow man. But the problem is you can get a wonderful communal experience at a movie theatre, or you can also just hate everyone around you if they’re making too much noise or being inconsiderate," Bale says.
"I think the future of cinema is the future of mankind," he says. "Can we still tolerate each other, or have we come to hate each other to such a degree that we would rather just stay home and not bother? Not to overdramatise it, but I think the future of mankind is at stake.
"There’s a sense that there’s not much time left," he says with a sigh. "Anyway, on that note. What would Burt do?" Bale asks.
— TCA
