Christian Bale’s 50th birthday: The perfectionist is gradually becoming milder with age

Whether magician, psychopath, superhero or supervillain: Christian Bale is one of those actors for whom the audience buys every role 100 percent. In addition to the talent of the Oscar winner, who was born exactly 50 years ago, this is primarily due to his willingness to push physical limits – and even a little further. At least when it comes to weight, the star has now vowed to be a little more considerate of his health.

Born early to higher acting

It became abundantly clear back in 1987 that the Welshman Christian Charles Phillip Bale was not your average actor. Just at the beginning of his teenage years, Bale initially took on a leading role in the dark fantasy film “Mio, my Mio”, before he landed his first leading role in the cinema in Steven Spielberg’s (77) war drama “The Empire of the Sun”.

For his role as a young war refugee, Bale was not only honored in the special Best Juvenile Performance category created especially for him. He also impressively demonstrated that he can carry a film entirely on his shoulders – no matter how narrow they may be at times.

Despite this remarkable start in the dream factory, it took a while for Bale to make his breakthrough. Although he appeared in numerous productions from the late 80s to the late 90s, it wasn’t until the new millennium that his Hollywood star began to rise – thanks, of all things, to a crazy yuppie named Patrick Bateman, who butchered his way through 1980s high society. The novel of the same name for “American Psycho” by Bret Easton Ellis (59) was considered so violent because of its detailed depiction of gruesome torture methods that it was on the German index for six years.

The annoying topic of weight

Four years later, many moviegoers gasped when they saw Bale in the mystery drama “The Machinist.” For the role of the sleepless factory worker, Bale starved himself down to an incredible 31 kilos and, weighing 55 kilos and standing 1.82 meters tall, was a truly frightening sight. To lose the weight, he partially reduced his diet to coffee, water and a single apple a day.

The very next year, Bale weighed 86 kilos again. In order to impersonate the superhero Batman, the Brit trained up over 30 kilos of muscle mass in a few months – only to lose 25 kilos the following year so that he could credibly portray a prisoner of war in “Rescue Dawn”. In the same year he was back at his ideal weight in “Prestige – The Masters of Magic”.

He repeated this game a few years later with the Batman sequel “The Dark Knight” and the subsequent “The Fighter” by David O. Russell (65), for which the mime starved himself to 66 kilos and won his first and so far only Oscar ( Supporting Actor) won. After “The Dark Knight Rises” he went in the other direction with “American Hustle”, which was released in 2013 – and built up a considerable amount of money.

But the fact that his weight was the main focus of attention during this phase of his work seemed to gnaw at Bale. On the one hand, because his actual acting performance sometimes faded into the background. On the other hand, because he saw himself as a bad role model for other actors. “It became a kind of indicator of commitment to your profession.” He himself claimed that he never saw his transformations as that and warned against the urge to overdo them. Otherwise, sooner or later “there will be a tragedy because of this.”

More lenient towards yourself and others?

In the same interview he finally saw this for himself. “I’ve become a little more boring because I’m older and I feel like, if I keep doing what I did in the past, then I’m going to die. I prefer not to die.”

So it took until his mid-40s before Bale wanted to take care of himself and his body. When it came to other people, he had already learned this lesson ten years earlier after an unpleasant incident on the set of Terminator Salvation. A recording of a tantrum during filming, in which he insulted a cameraman for several minutes and demanded that he be fired, went viral and severely damaged the star’s previously impeccable reputation. But Bale immediately followed up with an apology in which he regretted his thin-skinned nature, took 100 percent of the blame and vowed to do better. That was 15 years ago and so far Bale has been true to his word.

The constants in his life

It may sound paradoxical, but one of the greatest constants in Christian Bale’s work is his versatility – regardless of weight. This is proven by a look at the films of the past few years: in 2017 he rode through the prairie in the dark western “Enemies – Hostiles”, devoted himself to the political intrigue of Dick Cheney (82) in “Vice – The Second Man” (2018), and raced in “Le Mans 66 – Against Every Chance” (2019) or stood in the way of the Marvel warrior (Chris Hemsworth, 40) in “Thor: Love and Thunder” (2022) as Gorr the God Butcher.

The main fixture off camera is Bale’s wife Sibi Blažić (53). The two have been married since 2000, almost half of his life. In 2005 their first child, a daughter, was born. A son followed in 2014. In contrast to his roles, there were really only fat years in his love.