14 DAY TRIAL // At the Academy Awards 2011, later this month, Christian Bale may finally get to walk home with a much-coveted statuette for his supporting role of a druggie boxer in “The Fighter.” For the part, Bale infamously dropped a lot of weight.
As fans must know, Bale is not the one to say no if a script requires him to transform his body in one way or another, either in terms of packing muscle mass (“Batman Begins”) or becoming a shadow of his former self (“The Machinist”).
For “The Fighter” too, the actor dropped a lot of weight, though he’s not the one to talk about this lengthy and painful process of getting in shape for a new character.
However, he’ll not stand for overgeneralization: in a recent interview with the Australian issue of Empire, Bale hit back at one film critic for calling his weight fluctuations a “gimmick,” the Daily Mail informs.
As Bale sees it, playing Dicky Eklund, a former boxing champ and drug-addict, would have only been possible if he lost the weight – there was simply no other way to do it, so he doesn’t understand why people are saying he did because he wanted an Oscar.
“To be honest, I find it laughable that it’s considered to be some [expletive]-ing gimmick – it’s so patronizing,” Bale says in the aforementioned interview.
To say it’s a “gimmick” means taking away from him (from Bale) all the credit for the transformation, which he sees as necessary for the part.
“For God’s sake, do people not understand what a pain it is to do? It’s as though it’s some comment about, ‘Oh it’s easy for him, because he’s done it a bunch of times’,” the actor says.
“It’s not easy, it’s not fun – it’s horrible,” Bale adds. At one point while shooting for “The Fighter,” he reportedly survived with just one apple a day and water.
“I would never pick to do that, but it’s a part that I like and he's a welterweight and he’s a crackhead. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a welterweight with any fat on him – or a crackhead,” he adds.
“So it’s just what you end up having to do. Somebody told me that somebody wrote something about my ‘trademark weight loss’. I’d just like to [expletive] on that guy’s shoes,” the actor says.