A master of disguise

Christian Bale's haunting appearance in The Machinist

10 April 2012

Nothing will prepare you for Christian Bale's shocking appearance in his latest film, The Machinist. To play an unhinged - because insomniac - lathe operator in Brad Anderson's thriller, the 6ft 2in actor dropped four-and-a-half stone, to reach a skeletal final weight of eight-and-a-half stone. The results are as repulsive as they are disquieting. Gaunt face; protruding ribs; sallow skin. Horrific. It's the perfect expression of the madness in Bale's Method.

It is not just Bale's weight, or lack of it, that unnerves and, it must be said, compels. His character, Trevor Reznik, has not slept for more than a year (more than a year; it is hardly worth imagining) and he subsists in an exquisitely rendered emotional bubble as a result, his madness always threatening to unleash itself on an unsuspecting world.

This is a world so menacing, fuelled by creeping paranoia and hallucinations, a mystery in his past and only two friends - one a prostitute (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the other a waitress (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) - that the viewer, like Reznik's co-workers, shies away. But Bale's furious, tormented performance is magnetising; the viewer cannot look away for long, much as one would like to, drawn to his performance with dreadful inexorability.

Bale has always rigorously prepared for his roles. For The Machinist he survived on an apple and a caffe latte a day during filming, ending his evenings with a glass of whisky "because it dehydrates you by the next morning, so you'd look a little bit more skeletal". Forty-eight hours before shooting the scenes with his torso on show, he popped a diet pill to make himself look even more emaciated.

Such deprivations meant that he began to emulate Reznik. "I was in a constant state of weariness but never really tired," he says, almost gleefully. "I became very calm, because you have no energy to deal with anything else except the basic necessities of life. Nothing made me anxious or upset."

Reznik is a benign madman, which adds to his gruesome attraction. "I like him immensely," says Bale. "He's somebody who's completely sincere but has such guilt from his past that he's literally blocked it from his mind. He's in denial. But other than that I think he's a good soul."

Good he may be, but the effects on Bale's wife of five years were far from positive. His emaciated physical state terrified her. "I did wake up a couple of times with her very close, putting a mirror under my nose to check if I was still breathing," he says, flippantly. He promised her he would stop if anything serious happened, but Bale, 31, seems to think he's indestructible.

So afterwards, rather than build himself up slowly, the British actor ignored every bit of advice offered. "I was having bread and pizza, pasta and doughnuts, stuffing my face with everything possible and making myself feel sick. I put on a lot of weight in two months, which was too quick. That's when I felt unhealthy and that's when my heart was going like crazy." Anxiety attacks followed - and the cholesterol level of an 80-year-old.

Now, a year after the shoot, Bale is back in shape and has grown a straggly beard and mop of hair for his next disguiseas a 17th-century tobacco plantation-owner in Terrence Malick's The New World.

He slips effortlessly from one character to another. On the set of American Psycho (2000), he was tanned and sporting a perfectly chiselled torso to play Bret Easton Ellis's iconic serial killer Patrick Bateman; this summer, we'll see him squeezed into a Batsuit to play the Caped Crusader in Batman Begins. Bale was so super-heroically muscle-bound by the time he stepped on set, he managed to rip the costume the first time he tried it on.

Today he is affable and intelligent. He has an air of detachment when talking about his preparations for a role that is staggering; if he'd said he was still recovering from the trauma of entering into the machinist's fractured mind one would only sympathise with him. Not a bit of it.

"To me it's not suffering," he says. "Suffering is when you have no choice. I love stories of people wanting to really go to an extreme - guitarists who play until their fingers are bleeding. That image of somebody busting their arse for what they love doing. You feel like you've accomplished more at the end of the day than if you sit around getting fat and lazy."

Yet Bale nearly didn't become an actor at all after his time as a child star left him feeling deeply troubled. Born in Wales in 1974, he had been acting since the age of eight when he was cast, aged 13, as the lead in Spielberg's 1987 epic, Empire of the Sun. Beating hundreds to the role, he became the most written about child actor since Mickey Rooney.

Eventually he cracked under the pressure. During a round of interviews in a Parisian hotel, he refused to speak and then fled. "I really felt like I got bitten from the whole experience," he reflects. "People are ready for recognition at different ages and I definitely wasn't."

IT WAS Kenneth Branagh who convinced him not to quit, offering him a small role in Henry V. Then a starring role in Disney flop musical Newsies took him to Los Angeles. He made the city his home, a move that distanced him from the Brit pack of actors. But then Bale doesn't fit snugly into Hollywood either. He has a restlessness which stems from his childhood when he moved frequently with his family in pursuit of his late father's profession as a commercial pilot.

"I never stayed in one place or had long-lasting friendships," he says. "When I see someone who really identifies with where they come from, I feel a little bit lost." His peripatetic childhood, in such far-flung places as Reading and Portugal, prepared him well for the nomadic life of an actor. And his extended family provided him with inspiration: his mother, Jenny, was a dancer, one grandfather was a stand-up comic and member of the Magic Circle, the other a stand-in for John Wayne.

Bale preferred that chaos to stability - still does, which may explain some of his acting choices. Playing a character such the psycho Bateman was considered career-suicide, and Bale has since found himself floundering in flops such as the remake of Shaft (2000) and Europudding Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001). He enjoys "the possibility of complete disaster with a single movie. I've often thought to myself: 'I really should find something else to do.' I don't know what that would be, but it's tantalising to think that a single movie could finish it and force me to find something else to do. I think a lot of people play it very safe and I don't want to ever do that."

So why take the lead role in a potential blockbuster? The new Batman is anything but a safe bet, he explains. "It's as dark as we could make it."

Directed by Christopher Nolan, who made cult hit Memento, it rejects the camp theatrics of the earlier films in the franchise in favour of the grittier approach of the graphic novels. "We're reintroducing Batman from the start, the way he comes to create this persona," says Bale.

"The studio didn't want business as usual," he adds, so his Caped Crusader is very similar to Patrick Bateman. A risk indeed. What will the Bat fans think?

No matter what, the latest Batman will face a media frenzy and Bale is bracing himself. "I didn't want to make the Batman choice out of being scared of what the consequences could be," he says. But he gives the impression that he's almost hoping it tanks. "That's been the saving grace I've had - I've never had a hit movie. Part of me goes, 'Why should it start now? Maybe I'll manage to jinx Batman and it'll bomb."

It's unlikely. Bale's Batman may be dark, but dark is relative when it comes to movies. If you really want dark, go and see The Machinist. Just make sure you have a good night's sleep and a hearty meal first. For, as Bale says of his role, "it does change you mentally".

The Machinist opens on 18 March.

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