The Wild History of Christian Bale’s Drastic Movie Transformations

Miramax Films

Velvet Goldmine

In the 1998 film Bale is a music journalist who in looking into the retreat of singer Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) from public life, remembers his own coming of age as a closeted gay man who found himself amid the freedom and passion epitomized by Britain’s ’70s-era, Bowie-inspired glam rock scene.

The makeup and shag haircut played key supporting roles, but the character of Arthur Stuart did call for extra lankiness.

“I don’t find it difficult to not eat, so you know,” Bale told E! News back in 1998, “so I eat just soup. Well…actually, I started off and I was going running a lot, and then my mum came to stay with me for one night in the apartment that I had in London. And I was getting up at like 6 in the morning and going running, and she was like, ‘Christian, what are you doing?’

“And I said, ‘I’ve got to lose weight for it.’ And she said, ‘well hold a bit, you’re doing a film about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Why don’t you do it the way they did it? They weren’t out running, they just weren’t out eating. They didn’t eat but they drank a hell of a lot and lived very unhealthily. So I went, ‘yes, cheers, mom, alright’ and took that to heart and it works.”

Lionsgate Films

American Psycho

To play jacked homicidal yuppie Patrick Bateman in the enduring 2000 satire, Bale had his teeth capped and trained like, well, a madman. 

“I liked my old teeth,” he reminisced to The Guardian. “I have a molding of them on a shelf. But with Patrick Bateman, his physicality is much more important than with most characters. He deals totally in the superficial, and he’s incredibly narcissistic. I looked at myself in the mirror and it just wasn’t right. I was warned that if I got caps I could get a lisp, and you might still be able to tell in close-up. So I thought, I like my teeth, but I’m not so attached to them that I’m going to ruin this whole movie because I refuse to get them done.”

“Working out took over my life,” he admitted. “I became fascinated with talking about the body, and diet, and the gym. It made me very judgmental of other people’s bodies as well.”

As for the food, Bale said his American Psycho diet was the “most restrictive” of all the times he’s set out to reshape his body. “There were no cheat meals,” he told Train magazine in 2017. “It was all lean protein. No sugars, good fats and low carbs.”

Meanwhile, he had the role, then lost it to Leonardo DiCaprio when the studio thought casting Leo would make the idea of an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ gruesome novel more palatable, then Leo dropped out to make The Beach. Then it was offered to Ewan McGregor, but Bale convinced McGregor, who was also in Velvet Goldmine, that he was the man for the job.

“If you want something you have to say you want it,” Bale told Esquire in 2014. “That was a situation where I had been preparing for six months, even longer and… ‘What just happened?’ You know? So many people see showing your passion for something as a weakness. Because then they’ve got leverage on you…So a lot of people play the game of only so much [interest]. I’m no good at that. I’ve got the worst poker face…I’m not a businessman. I want this to be about feelings. That’s how it should be.”

Enough back-and-forth to drive anybody crazy, but it turned out to be an iconic role for Bale. (And a way better movie than book.)

Paramount Classics

The Machinist

“If you were any thinner, you wouldn’t exist.”

The most infamous of Bale’s transformations, the one that qualifies as truly grotesque, was to play Trevor Reznik, an unstable, insomniac factory worker who loses his mind when he’s fired after a workplace accident in this 2004 thriller. Nothing says commitment like Bale’s 63-pound weight loss—a third of his body weight—that left his ribs protruding, his eyes sunken and his emotions dulled.

No fancy tricks here, other than starving himself with a diet of black coffee, an apple and one can of tuna a day, plus vitamins and mineral supplements.

“It just didn’t enter my head that it could be done any other way, really,” he told the BBC. “I just realized, ‘Okay, I have to lose weight.’ I just had no idea how much I would have to lose in order to get the look that I was searching for.

“I had a photograph of [country singer] Hank Williams when he was only 29, but he was looking like he was coming on 50, I guess just from abuse. It was a photograph of him getting released from jail just a few months before he died. He’s shirtless and he looks a wreck, absolutely emaciated. So I stuck that on the front of the script to be kind of my image of what Trevor should be, and then just kept going and going and trying to reach that.”

He ended up going 20 pounds lower than the lowest healthy weight advised by a nutritionist. (And lower than the role required, the writer having used his own height as a benchmark and not having a chance to adjust the target weight before Bale, who’s about 6 inches taller, got the script and took that number as a challenge.)

“It’s an amazing experience doing that,” Bale recalled to The Guardian in 2018. “When you’re so skinny that you can hardly walk up a flight of stairs…you’re, like, this being of pure thought. It’s like you’ve abandoned your body. That’s the most Zen-like state I’ve ever been in my life. Two hours sleep, reading a book for 10 hours straight without stopping…unbelievable. You couldn’t rile me up. No roller coaster of emotions.”

Probably because he didn’t have the energy to feel any emotions.

“As soon as you start putting the food back in your stomach, the rollercoaster comes back,” he added. After they shot the most skeletal scene, when Bale mock-preens in front of Jennifer Jason Leigh, he started gaining weight.

Warner Bros.

Batman Begins

After The Machinist wrapped, Bale had six weeks to not look like a beanpole for the Batman Begins screen test.

“My metabolism had to get back up to speed, because my heart had got used to a whole different way of living for some time,” he told the BBC.

Bale returned to his regular weight eating high-calorie foods and then packed 35 pounds of muscle on top of it.

“I overdid it because I also was just enjoying gorging,” he said in October 2004, per Radio Free Entertainment. “I was ignoring all advice about ‘you should take it slowly, your stomach has shrunk, just go with soups.’ I was straight into pizza and ice cream and everything,  and just eating five meals in a sitting. My stomach, it just expanded really quickly.” In turn, “I got pretty sick during that time! But I enjoyed getting sick, I didn’t mind it at all. So In that short amount of time I did actually go from 121 right back up to 180, which is way too fast obviously And that resulted in some doctors visits to get things sorted out.”

Once his weight was back up to a healthy level, he resumed running—which he enjoys more than lifting weights, though of course he also lifted weights.

“I would do three sets of 10 to eight, depending on what I was working on,” Bale told Train magazine. “Usually, the last set was a little lower rep-wise because I’d want to be struggling, you know? Then I’d always shock my body with drop-sets and supersets.” His diet was mainly “proteins, carbs and good, healthy fats.”

“He walked in and looked like a linebacker,” The Machinist co-star Michael Ironside remembered in a Reddit AMA seeing Bale at Sundance six months after they finished shooting.

“Actually, I gained too much weight in the run up to Batman Begins,” Bale told Train. “I wasn’t the size that [director] Christopher Nolan wanted, so I had to cut down 20 pounds or so just before shooting—I was a lot beefier at first. That cutting down was achieved by going on a calorie deficit and running more and for longer. I cut a lot of the carbs out of my diet for those few weeks as well.”

MGM

Rescue Dawn

A decade before DiCaprio was eating bison liver for The Revenant, Bale was stomaching maggots to play real-life P.O.W. Dieter Dengler, who weighed 98 pounds when he was finally rescued, in Werner Herzog‘s Vietnam War survival epic, which he shot toward the end of 2005 but whose release was delayed until July 2007.

Off went all the Batman weight, as well as a bunch of regular-Bale weight.

“I had the most astonishing experiences with him where he lost 65 pounds for a role he accepted,” Herzog told Esquire UK in 2014. (The New Yorker reported 55 pounds in 2006.) “The amount of sacrifice. He’s the most diligent, professional human you can ever need.”

He shot the film’s later scenes, where Bale is skinniest, first, which gave Bale more time to get back into shape for his next movie because he was able to put on weight through the course of the 44-day shoot in Thailand.

As for those maggots, Herzog, who lost almost 30 pounds in solidarity with Bale, told Rotten Tomatoes in 2007, “I’ve seen people in other country eat maggots, and they’re very rich in protein. So there’s nothing really wrong about it. In our own cultural context we’re not accustomed to eating maggots, but Christian Bale always knew I would essentially offer to do things I asked from the actors. For example, when we were in the rapids, I spent all day with them in the water. I offered to eat a couple of spoonfuls of maggots, but in this case Christian said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, just turn on the camera and let me get on with it.'”

Buena Vista Pictures

The Prestige

No DNA was spliced in the making of this drama, which also starred Hugh Jackman as a rival magician to Bale’s mindbogglingly talented illusionist.

“I remember Christian was worried because he was meeting to play a superhero,” Christopher Nolan told The New York Times in 2010, recalling how shockingly thin the actor was when he first met him before they started shooting Batman Begins. “But I came away from it feeling I’d never seen such focus and dedication from an actor.”

Right after the first leg of the Dark Knight trilogy, Bale shot Terrence Malick‘s The New World, then spent 24 days shooting David Ayer‘s indie drama Harsh Times, then dropped 55 pounds for Rescue Dawn, then reunited with Nolan for the early 2006 shoot.

When he read the script for The Prestige, he told Film Monthly in October 2006, “There were so many mysteries surrounding this one character that he was immediately the one I wanted to play.”

In a way, Bale got to transform back into himself, an inscrutable fellow with an accent. And once again, he was the one who wore his acting heart on his sleeve, telling Nolan he wanted the role of Alfred Borden. Ultimately, Bale also enjoyed the tight shoot, the polar opposite of the seven months it took to make Batman Begins. 

“Chris was a shape shifter in the way he went to very different styles of directing from Batman to this,” Bale described the experience to CinemaBlend in 2006. “He really wanted to be able to move very quickly, spin on a dime, and have us all ready to approach different scenes in different ways. Maybe we are going to do this scene today, maybe we’re going to do this one instead.”

Alas, Bale didn’t transform into a magician. He told Collider in 2017 that he vividly remembered “learning absolutely no magic from it whatsoever.”

The Weinstein Company

I’m Not There

Bale reunited with Velvet Goldmine director Todd Haynes to play two of six interpretations of Bob Dylan in the 2007 musical drama. (Interestingly, Haynes said Adrian Brody  was his first choice for Bale’s part, but “he was sort of hemming and hawing.” Bale does not hem and haw if he wants to do a part.) 

If you’ve ever seen Newsies, you know there’s a song and dance man lurking within Bale, but of course playing music’s greatest bard wasn’t just about the music.

“Two men on a real quest for truth,” was how the actor described the ’60s- and ’80s-era Dylans he embodied.  

At one point in the movie his Dylan is “given an award for being the mouthpiece of his generation—and he stands up there and says a big f–k-you, very poetically,” Bale told New York magazine. “Since I was a kid, I’ve always had this image of Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar so much that his fingers are bleeding—and there’s probably no truth to it, but it doesn’t matter. I just remember thinking what a great image, somebody loving something so much they don’t even feel the pain.”

Sounds familiar.

Warner Bros.

Terminator Salvation

Bale infamously turned himself into a diva for a few hot minutes on the set of the 2009 sci-fi action thriller.

“I was out of order beyond belief,” Bale said a few days later on KROQ-FM’s The Kevin & Bean Show in apologizing after a profanity-laced tirade against the movie’s director of photography, Shane Hurlbut, from July 2008 made it to TMZ in February 2009. “I acted like a punk. There is nobody who heard the tape who is hit harder than me. I make no excuses for it. It is inexcusable.”

There was a bit of method in that madness, but he acknowledged he went too far.

“I was trying to show a little of [John Connor’s world’s-fate-on-his-shoulders intensity] in the blood craziness,” he explained. “It went very wrong…I made it ugly. That was awful of me. I took it way too far. I mixed up fact and fiction. I’m half John Connor there. I’m half Christian there.”

Bale concluded, “Please, I want to make it clear. I am embarrassed by it. I regret it. I ask everybody to sit down and ask themselves if they have ever had a bad day and lost their temper and really regretted it immensely.”

“We all know how intense and focused Christian is,” Terminator Salvation director McG told the Los Angeles Times. “What happened, it was a catalyst for some steam being blown off. We felt safe and controlled. In very short order, people were hugging and we had moved on. Shane finished the picture.

“I’m not trying to spin it. I can happily report that Christian doesn’t feel good about this. He’s given thought to the adjustments he wants to give to his life. Christian is a good man. He’s not a fundamentally mean guy. To [Hurlbut], he has made amends and apologized clearly and plainly. In that respect, that has been handled.”

Paramount Pictures

The Fighter

Bale won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar (and all the other awards) for his role as Dicky Eklund, a once-promising boxer turned drug addict turned ex-con trainer trying to make amends to his still-promising half-brother Micky Ward in the 2010 film, based on a true story.

“I have no goal of seeing if I can become invisible one day, eat so little that I disappear,” Bale assured MTV News at the time regarding his 30-pound weight loss.” He continued, “I didn’t take this job because I went, ‘Oh, there’s a physical transformation needed.’ I always go, ‘Damn! There’s a physical transformation needed!’

“Again, I just didn’t recognize that. I just liked the character and then realized, ‘Oh, crap, he’s a welterweight.'”

In boxing, a welterweight is between 140 and 147 pounds.

“I can’t lose that much weight, because I wouldn’t be able to box and train and everything,” Bale said. “I didn’t look at numbers, I didn’t look at scale, I just went down to what looked like might be the right body type for Dicky and the way that he fights as well.”

He achieved his gaunt frame “just running like crazy,” he told Latino Review. “I could just run for hours on end and I felt really healthy.”

Also to MTV, Bale said, “I couldn’t go too far. Because if I went too far, I’d be able to play the crackhead side, but then after jail, he got clean mentally and physically, and he’s always wiry, he’s always lean, but I had to be able to show that. So we needed makeup to help me out a great deal with that.”

He also wore false teeth, because Patrick Bateman’s perfect pearly whites wouldn’t do.

Sony Pictures

American Hustle

Bale’s character in David O. Russell‘s 2013 dark comedy is a con artist, so fakery was built into the role, from the top of Irving Rosenfeld’s obvious hair piece to the tips of his loafers. But the potbelly is all Bale.

“I think I’m certainly getting older,” Bale told USA Today. “I thought I was going to lose the weight I gained for American Hustle. I said, two months, flat, that’ll do it. I was 185 and I went up to 228 for it. And I’m still working that off! It’s almost six months later. Now I know that when I was in my early 20s it would have been two months and that’s it.”

Added co-star Amy Adams, “The thing that really bothered me on this one is I was in all those small dresses and swimsuits so I was eating egg whites and avocado for breakfast and he would have these amazingly delicious bacon-egg-bagel concoctions.”

Not only that. “I ate lots of doughnuts, a whole lot of cheeseburgers and whatever I could get my hands on,” Bale told People. “I literally ate anything that came my way.”

Bale later claimed that his wife didn’t particularly mind when he gained weight for a role, but it wasn’t ideal for father-daughter bonding.

“Because part of the thing I love is running around playing with my daughter: wrestling, climbing…And I couldn’t do it. I felt horrible,” he told Esquire in 2014 after losing the American Hustle weight. “You do appreciate it when you get back to a place where you can spend time on a trampoline and not feel like you’re going to die.”

Asked back in 2006 whether his real-life relationships ever suffered because of his film commitments, Bale scoffed at the notion, telling Film Monthly, “I enjoy that. I enjoy that obsession. Everybody around me, my family and my wife and little girl they get that. They understand it and they enjoy it too. They don’t mind it.”

20th Century Fox

Exodus: Gods and Kings

Who knew abs were essential in freeing the Israelites from bondage in pharaoh’s Egypt? Bale whipped himself back into shape to play Moses with your standard trim-and-fit-guy’s diet and exercise routine, which included cardio and those dratted weights.

If there was a flaw in the actor’s physique, it was barely noticeable.

“If you look closely, you can see my left arm is skinnier than my right. You really can,” Bale told Esquire. “Because I hadn’t been able to use it for a long time. I lost all my use. It was just a limp thing hanging.”

He had been in a motorcycle crash at the end of 2012 that left him with major nerve damage.

“I couldn’t move my fingers at all, so I just wasted away,” he said. “My whole arm just became nothing. And then gradually I started to be able to get tiny movement. I still don’t have the same mobility. So, I am definitely trying to favor my right arm through [Exodus]. I’m glad of those costumes. They could cover a bit of the American Hustle gut which I was desperately trying to get rid of. But—wooo—it’s taking a long time.”

Paramount Pictures

The Big Short

Shapeless T-shirts, a bad haircut and a lot of sitting in front of computers made Bale into Michael Burry, the socially awkward neurologist turned hedge fund manager with a glass eye who figured out that mortgage-backed securities were about to crash in 2008 and take the U.S. economy down with them…and that there was a fortune to be made by shorting the market.

“I’m incredibly aware of the honor he gave me in allowing me into his incredible brain and psyche and emotions, and so I respect that immensely,” Bale, who spent time getting to know Burry to prepare, told Screen Rant in 2015. “And I know that he trusts me to keep that to myself, other than what I show in the film.”

Bale also worked on mastering one of Burry’s favorite pastimes, drumming, in two weeks.

“It was a wonderful crash course, double kick drum,” he called. “Pantera, ‘By Demons Be Driven’—fantastic song to begin with. This is how Mike Burry unwound.”

Greig Fraser / Annapurna Pictures

Vice

A noticeably heavy Bale, sporting a buzz cut, explained to CBS News in December 2017, “It wasn’t just for fun I decided to shave my head, bleach my eyebrows and put on 40 pounds; I was playing Mr. Dick Cheney in a film which we wrapped last week. This is a canvas by which the superb makeup artists create Cheney.”

Though in 2016 he reportedly turned down the role of Enzo Ferrari for a biopic about the iconic Italian automaker due to concerns about another weight gain and subsequent loss, apparently re-teaming with Adam McKay for a film about one of the most notoriously influential American politicians of all time was too appealing to pass up. Or…

“No, I thought he was bats–t crazy,” Bale told Collider in April 2017 when asked if it was an immediate yes, “but often a genius is, isn’t it?…[McKay] has an ability that I haven’t seen in another filmmaker to take a project that on the surface does not seem appropriate for a film whatsoever and make it one of the most compelling and entertaining films that I’ve seen in a long while, and that’s with The Big Short, so he’s one of the few people that I think can handle this other project.”

So, he consulted experts right off the bat. No cheeseburger-and-ice-cream diet this time.

“I had never before gone to a doctor or a nutritionist about gaining or losing weight for my roles,” Bale said on CBS This Morning.”But eventually that caught up with me. So, finally…I decided that maybe somebody knows better than I do; so I went to somebody and they managed to get me up a good 40 pounds. It’s never healthy to put on that amount of weight in a short amount of time, but I did it in the healthiest manner.”

He stuck with the professional advice on his way down the scale too. “In the past for losing weight I went, ‘Ah, I’ll just smoke and drink whiskey and eat everything,’ and it worked!” he told CBS. “But I’m in my mid-40s now and I just thought, ‘Probably just eating cream puffs nonstop is not gonna be so good for my ticker.'”

Whatever he did worked, because he’s been looking a lot like Christian Bale again these days.