Every Major Movie Role Christian Bale Turned Down

Every Major Movie Role Christian Bale Turned Down

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As famous as he is for playing characters like Batman, Christian Bale has passed on some big franchises. Here’s every major movie role he turned down.

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Here’s every major movie role Christian Bale passed on. Most actors would love to appear in a Steven Spielberg film at some point in their career (be it in a big or small role), but Bale got to play the lead in one when he was only twelve years old. And while it wasn’t his first movie, Bale’s performance in Spielberg’s 1987 drama Empire of the Sun (in which he plays a British boy living with his wealthy family in Shanghai when WWII breaks out) quickly cemented his status as a young talent to watch, as well as an thespian capable of expressing great depth of emotion. Sure enough, by the time he was a young adult, Bale has started to work consistently with top-tier filmmakers, including the likes of Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion, and Todd Haynes.

As he grew older, Bale developed a reputation for throwing himself head-first into his roles. He became particularly notorious for gaining and losing extreme amounts of weight in order to better physically embody his characters, ranging from the muscle-bound Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies to the emaciated Trevor Reznik in The Machinist and, in an Oscar-winning turn, the drug-addicted former boxer Dick “Dicky” Ecklund in The Fighter. Thankfully, he’s since sworn off going to such extremes anymore in the wake of his role as the former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney in the 2018 biopic Vice.

Like any celebrity, Bale has encountered his fair share of bumps in the road (see also: his infamous rant on the set of Terminator Salvation), but his career is going strong heading into the 2020s. Coming off the success of 2019’s Oscar-winning Ford v Ferrari (a drama about the Ford Company’s attempt to defeat Ferrari at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans car race), Bale is preparing to reunite with his The Fighter and American Hustle director David O. Russell on an as-yet untitled film, in addition to playing the mystery villain in Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love & Thunder. But before that happens, we’re taking a look back at the biggest movie roles Bale’s said no to in the past.

Syriana

Every Major Movie Role Christian Bale Turned Down

Syriana, a geopolitical thriller about the global oil industry that’s loosely based on real-events (as depicted in Robert Baer’s 2003 memoir, See No Evil) certainly reads like something in Bale’s wheelhouse as an actor on paper. Indeed, ahead of production, Oscar-winning writer-turned director Stephen Gaghan reached out to Bale about having him costar in the 2005 film as Bryan Woodman, a U.S. energy analyst and the lead in one of several narrative threads in the movie. He ended up having to pass due to a scheduling conflict with shooting on Terrence Malick’s The New World (where Bale played John Rolfe), so his future Ford v Ferrari costar Matt Damon took the role instead. Amusingly enough, George Clooney underwent a Bale-like weight gain for his own role in Syriana as CIA operative Bob Barnes, and even won an Oscar for his efforts (though he later said he regretted it after it inflamed a spinal injury he’d suffered while performing a stunt for the film).

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Casino Royale

Every Major Movie Role Christian Bale Turned Down

As the producers of the James Bond movies began their search for Pierce Brosnan’s replacement as the iconic secret agent back in the early 2000s, they already knew they wanted to take the brand in a more serious direction following its descent into camp during Brosnan’s run. According to Harrison Cheung and Nicola Pittam’s 2012 book Christian Bale: The Inside Story of the Darkest Batman, producer Barbara Broccoli became convinced Bale was the right man for the job after seeing him play Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron’s acclaimed horror-satire American Psycho in 2000. Bale, however, wasn’t interested and felt the Bond character represented “every despicable stereotype about England and British actors,” as the book puts it. A few years later, Daniel Craig took over the Bond mantle from Brosnan in his place and earned strong reviews for his turn in 2006’s Casino Royale, successfully putting a grittier and more steely-eyed spin on the character in the process.

W.

Every Major Movie Role Christian Bale Turned Down

A decade before Bale played Dick Cheney, he nearly portrayed his coworker in the White House, George W. Bush, in Oliver Stone’s W., a biopic about the U.S. president (who was wrapping up his second term when the film hit theaters). Back in 2008, Stone told MTV Bale had already spent months being fitted for prosthetics and studying Bush’s vocal mannerisms when he backed out the eleventh hour, feeling the various hair and makeup tests just weren’t working. Josh Brolin was subsequently brought onboard as his replacement, and delivered a performance that was mostly well-received when the movie opened. The biopic itself, on the other hand, was a box office disappointment and drew middling reviews, with critics arguing its attempts to be “fair” to Bush resulted in a muddled memoir with little in the way of rich insight or meaningful commentary to offer.

Child 44

Every Major Movie Role Christian Bale Turned Down

Bale and Ridley Scott eventually worked together on 2014’s misbegotten Exodus: Gods and Kings, but they had a few close calls before that. While a rumor that Bale was being eyed to play Robin Hood in Scott’s 2010 adaptation of the folklore hero legend turned out to be little more than hot air, he was, in fact, courted to star in Child 44 before he turned it down. An adaptation of Tom Rob Smith’s 2008 novel of the same name about a Russian military police officer who investigates a series of child murders in the Stalin-era Soviet Union, the film later cast Tom Hardy as its lead, with Scott producing after initially being attached to direct. It’s just as well Bale took a pass: Child 44 was mostly ignored at the box office and drew mixed to negative reviews, with critics taking it task for being a dull thriller that fails to streamline the labyrinth plot of Smith’s celebrated source material into an equally tight and nerve-wracking story on the big screen.

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Steve Jobs

Every Major Movie Role Christian Bale Turned Down

With Aaron Sorkin on writing duties and Danny Boyle directing, it’s no wonder 2015’s Steve Jobs was able to put together a cast full of heavy-hitting character actors like Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, Katherine Waterston, and Michael Stuhlbarg, along with Seth Rogen in a rare (but well-done) dramatic turn as Steve Wozniak. Prior to Boyle’s involvement, Sorkin’s The Social Network collaborator David Fincher was attached to call the shots, and wanted to cast Bale as the titular Apple co-founder. However, even after Fincher left and was replaced by Boyle, Bale was once again in line to take the lead role. He formally declined in 2014, with THR’s sources reporting he simply felt he wasn’t the right choice to play Jobs (despite his proven talent for portraying equally driven and intense fictional characters). Fassbender later signed on in his place and received top marks from critics for his handling of Sorkin’s dialogue-heavy script, landing him a Best Actor Oscar nod along the way.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Part of what makes Bale’s casting in Thor: Love & Thunder so unexpected is that he’s usually avoided franchises in the past, save for The Dark Knight trilogy and Terminator Salvation. Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast in January 2018, though, the actor confirmed he’d spoken to Lucasfilm about a key role in Solo: A Star Wars Story (namely, young Han’s criminal mentor Tobias Beckett, a character ultimately portrayed by Woody Harrelson in the film) before he passed, saying he remains open to “further discussions” for future Star Wars movies. Solo would later become infamous for being the first theatrically-released live-action Star Wars film to bomb at the box office, but it earned perfectly respectable reviews and only lost money because its mid-production change in director(s) led to its budget ballooning. Still, here’s hoping that if Bale ever does make a Star Wars movie, things go a whole lot smoother on its way to theaters.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/christian-bale-movies-roles-characters-turned-down/

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