14 DAY TRIAL // Being famous sucks. With fame comes a lot of unwanted attention, and people suddenly decide that they’re entitled to the most intimate details from your life and every second of your time. Christian Bale hates being a celebrity but he loves (well, he loves-hates) to act, so he knows he has no other choice but to take the bad with the good.
To promote his latest movie, “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” Bale sat down for a chat with the Wall Street Journal and he put in his 2 cents about fellow celebrities, the media attention, making movies, and what it was like to be part of the worst “Terminator” in the entire franchise, “Terminator: Salvation.”
On the set of the film, Bale was recorded going off on a DP, a rant that is still considered the best celebrity rant of all times. Kanye West, you lose. To this day, Bale still hasn’t forgiven director McG for “ruining” the film so, yes, the man can surely hold a grudge.
Christian Bale, not the sugar-coating-type of guy
Christian Bale is unapologetic about the way he acts off set, during press junkets or with the paparazzi. He doesn’t understand why people make so much fuss around him as a celebrity, when all he is is an actor who happens to do movies he likes: it’s not like he’s saving the world or really doing anything that matters, he says.
Christian Bale is just as unapologetic when it comes to things he says or does. He simply doesn’t care to play by the rules of the fame game, he doesn’t care if studios would deem him unsuitable to carry a future movie (probably because he already has the reputation of a very solid actor to fall back on), and he definitely doesn’t care if the media deems him a rage monster, which they’ve already done.
Speaking to WSJ, the actor says that he’s often in a position in which he has to choose: choose between answering a provocation and giving a nasty reporter or paparazzo their “money shot” by going nuclear on them, and storming off.
Sometimes, he admits, he’s “stupid” and takes the confrontation, which is how he came to have this rage monster reputation. For instance, he recalls, just over the summer he and his wife were in Italy and there was a photographer who stalked his wife for days on end, saying the most offensive things to her. As her husband, Bale had no other choice but to go after the guy, which gave him exactly what he wanted: his money shot.
Choose and own it, don’t whine
Bale isn’t complaining though: going after a paparazzo or exploding on a reporter are choices he makes. Sometimes he feels sorry for acting this way, most of the times he doesn’t – but he always owns the fact that this was his choice.
He believes he’s entitled to his privacy and he acts accordingly, but he says he’d never whine to the media about not having the media respect it. Like George Clooney does.
“It’s boring, isn’t it? You know what I mean? It doesn’t matter that he talks about it. It’s like, come on, guys, just shut up. Just get on with it and live your lives and stop whining about it. I prefer not to whine about it,” Bale says of Clooney.
The ironic part is that, with his anecdote about the paparazzo stalking his wife and how the things he said about her dehumanized and degraded him, this is exactly what Bale seemed to be doing: he was whining to a media outlet about how the media doesn’t respect his privacy.
An unapologetic man, a wonderful read
Even so, fans of Christian Bale won’t find fault with that because this is simply the kind of man he is: he has the ability to lose himself completely in a role, to reinvent himself with each character he portrays, but his social and celebrity skills are poor.
He doesn’t want to and will never learn how to play the fame game, even if that ends up costing him in the long run because his refusal to do so translates into poorer ticket sales. Christian Bale is, if you will, an actor who’d like the industry to consider him just as such, never a celebrity.
So yes, his interview with WSJ is a wonderful read, if you’re a fan.
