Christian Bale Kept Rejecting Every Movie Offer in Hope of American Psycho
After getting kicked from American Psycho, the famous method actor was so obsessed with getting this role back that he essentially stonewalled all other offers.
There are few actors that instantly come to mind when someone says “extreme dedication,” and Christian Bale is definitely one of them. Bale is famous for the insane feats he pulls off for his roles like gaining or losing two-thirds of his weight and method-acting his way into the minds of the craziest characters.
Bale has played several iconic characters throughout his career, and while superhero fans primarily know him as Bruce Wayne from Christopher Nolan ’s Dark Knight trilogy, the general audience mostly associates the actor with American Psycho — the utterly unhinged cult classic where Bale played the main character.
Christian Bale has always been able to sense a great movie, and as soon as he learned about American Psycho, he was very hyped about starring in it.
At first, he bagged the role — but then, the movie’s director Mary Harron was pressured from above: they wanted Harron to switch Bale for someone more bankable. He was fired.
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Despite this grim news, Bale surprisingly never gave up the hope of getting the role of Patrick Bateman back. He was so convinced that it would happen one day that he began to effectively stonewall all other job offers to make sure he’d be free whenever the invitation to return to American Psycho would come around.
“Everybody around me was like, forget it! You’re getting fixated on this. And I wouldn’t. With any other script that came in, I’d say, ‘Well look, I quite like it but no, because American Psycho might come up. I’m not risking it.’ I just refused to admit that it wouldn’t happen,” the actor shared with EW.
The weirdest thing in this story is that Christian Bale ended up being right: he was once again offered to play Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, and it felt great. Bale shared that this was the most important role to him because “rather than being just a part in a film, [he was] essentially being the film.”
And what a great decision it was for both sides! Bale’s performance in American Psycho was nothing short of iconic, and we can’t possibly imagine anyone else nailing it this well.
Source: EW