The darkest knight

Christian Bale is the latest to take the Batman role

10 April 2012

In keeping with the Ã¼ber-LA surroundings of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Christian Bale, dressed in standard movie-star mufti of expensive jeans and T-shirt, is looking lean, tanned and Hollywood buff.

He's relaxed yet focused, betraying none of the extreme physical demands his eclectic career has made on him recently. He also appears unperturbed that the title role in British director Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins has perched him on the precipice of serious, marquee-name celebrity, a position he has never sought and one he admits to accepting with some misgivings.

'It was the one fear I had about taking on this movie,' he says, his voice, after 10 months filming, still coloured by an American accent.

Born in Pembrokeshire in 1974 to a pilot father, and mother who was a circus dancer, Bale made his screen debut in 1987 as a young boy adrift in war-torn Shanghai in Steven Spielberg's Empire Of The Sun and has since proved his versatility in a diverse range of films including Little Women, American Psycho, Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Reign Of Fire.

If he is accustomed by now to sculpting his body to fit the role, nothing could have prepared him for the ordeal of the past 12 months. For 2004's The Machinist he shed over four-and-a-half stone on a diet of chewing gum and cigarettes to play a horrifically emaciated factory drone slowly dying of insomnia. 'I was in a really pathetic state,' he says, ruefully.

Worse was to come. Immediately after that, he was faced with the Herculean challenge of supersizing himself for his next role. 'Batman has no superpowers so we couldn't get away with him looking like some Joe Schmo who never works out,' he says. 'Losing the weight was more of a mental discipline, which actually leads to a place of great calm. It was far less healthy putting on the weight because I was just stuffing myself with anything I could get in my mouth.

A doctor said to me, "You're nuts, you're going to do real damage." It was hell to be honest. I went from 120lb to 220 within five months.'

It must have hurt, then, when all that graft failed to elicit the expected response. 'I turned up in England, bearded, long hair, and I was walking towards Chris Nolan. I was like, "Hi Chris" and he had absolutely no idea who I was. When he got closer he went, "Holy f***! You look like Grizzly Adams, what's going on?"

Then he was like, "OK, you did a good job, you got really big like I asked you to, but maybe we should try slimming you down a little." Some crew-members were somewhat more candid. They came in and were like, "What movie are we doin' here, Fatman?"'

Emphatically not. There isn't an ounce of flab on Nolan's Batman. Charting, as its title suggests, the transformation of emotionally scarred rich kid Bruce Wayne into the Caped Crusader, it mines every vein of twisted psychodrama from the tale without stinting on the furious action.

By far the darkest vision yet of this most complex and fascinating superhero, it breathes thrilling new life into a movie franchise that came to a screeching, high-camp halt in 1997 with the preposterous Batman & Robin, starring George Clooney.

The patriotically inclined can take pride in the fact that this regeneration, with the notable exceptions of Morgan Freeman and Katie Holmes, consists of homegrown talent. With Nolan (Memento, Insomnia) at the helm, the cast list is littered with Brits and Irish - Michael Caine (superb as faithful butler Alfred), Gary Oldman (as Lieutenant Gordon) and Liam Neeson (as Bruce Wayne's enigmatic trainercum-mentor Henri Ducard) among them.

Still, it is Bale, whose immense talent brings unprecedented humanity to the conflicted vigilante, who will receive the lion's share of plaudits. His Dark Knight is a man driven not by altruism but by seething rage and pain. Which was precisely the attraction for Bale.

'About five years ago,' he explains, 'a friend of mine gave me a copy of Arkham Asylum (Grant Morrison's addition to the plethora of psychogoth graphic novels that define the modern Batman). 'I read it grudgingly because I just wasn't into that kind of thing, but I was surprised at how interesting it was.' Bale was so intrigued, in fact, that he entreated his agent to keep track of any forthcoming Batman projects and find out what the tone was likely to be.

'Chris Nolan coming on board was a sign that [Warner Brothers] didn't want to repeat what they'd done before. And the fact that they were very interested in my playing Batman proved how committed they were, as I said, "I ain't going to do it the way it's been done before."'

Bale's own militarized body armour is hardly conventional attire. 'It was good for the fight scenes because it gave great protection,' he says. 'And it was the lightest batsuit ever made. But you still sweat like a pig in it. The cowl was my favourite - I loved the look of it, very panther-like, and it got me into the whole mode of being Batman. It gave me a splitting headache, and I kind of imagined Batman having a headache the whole time. If you spent all day with your head in a latex vice, you'd be a ball of fury, too.'

A less welcome headache for Bale, who has so far managed to keep himself, his threemonthold daughter and wife of five years, film producer Sibi Blazic, out of the headlines, is the level of fame that Batman Begins may bring.

'That did make me nervous,' he says. 'The consequences: what if I become - euuuch - a celebrity? That's always seemed so hideous. But I decided I wasn't going to be scared off a potentially great movie. I want to continue to make diverse movies and hopefully that'll allow me to escape. And, honestly, how can you prepare for something like that? I like to believe I'll have a certain amount of control in terms of attitude. And now, I guess, I'm going to find out.'

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The darkest knight

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