Christian Bale isn’t your typical GQ server, but that’s exactly where he’s landed this month, in part because he’s interested in his latest collaboration with David O. Russell, Amsterdamof which Bell is also a producer.
The $82 million movie faces an uphill battle in its first week of release. Although booked in 3,000 theaters across the country, it’s only looking at $10 million in ticket sales, per analysis From Anthony D’Alessandro of Deadline. Given that, Bell said he decided to take the opportunity to give a big, shiny interview to help promote the film.
“People have always told me that this kind of thing helps,” the actor Tell GQ. “I never believed it. But I was like, ‘Okay, okay. I care. I care, you know?'”
The other thing he cared about was not getting caught up in playing Batman after the success of his collaboration with Christopher Nolan which brought in billions of dollars on the… The Dark Knight triple. But he said that if he did, there would be a positive side: he would finally stop acting.
“I loved it because I was like, ‘This could be it.’ I can’t be anything but that. “For a lot of people, I wouldn’t do that,” Bell said. “I was like, ‘Ah, maybe I’m going to have to go do something different. “Maybe this damn thing [acting] Which I was forced to do as a kid that I didn’t want to do in the first place, I walked out. And I’m free. And then it didn’t happen.”
How did he isolate himself – and his arrogance – from the negative effects of the cultural phenomenon that Nolan’s films have become?
“It’s always felt like it was something someone else did, really, in so many ways,” Bell told the magazine. “I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. This thing happened there. And that works fine there, I hear. That’s cool.’ And I’m going to Ralph’s, the supermarket, to get bananas.”
The Academy Award winner continued, “I’ve never considered myself a pioneering man. It’s just Boring. You don’t get the good parts. Even if I starred, I pretend I’m playing like, you know, the fourth and fifth character, because you get more freedom. I also don’t really think about the overall effect of that [a character’s] We will have. It is up to me to play, much like animals and children. You have a tunnel vision of what you’re doing, and you don’t think about the impact it’s having.”
Bell says his career has been planned “with a zero-sum strategy. I think some people mistakenly think I’m a leader, and that goes on and I don’t understand it.”
Speaking of leading men, there’s one Hollywood hero who takes a first look at every sexy part according to Bell, including Patrick Bateman in American Psycho: Leonardo DiCaprio.
“Oh, dude. It’s not just me. Look, to this day, any role anyone gets, it’s just because he died before that. It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you. It doesn’t matter how friendly you are with the directors. All those people who I worked with them a few times, they offered him each one of these roles first. Right? One of these guys told me that. So thank you Leo, because literally, he can choose everything he does. And good for him, he’s amazing.”
But Biel, who has won the same number of Academy Awards as DiCaprio, says he doesn’t take it personally.
“Do you know how grateful I am for getting any damn thing?” asks the actor. “I mean, I can’t do what he’s doing. I don’t want the revelations he has either. And he does it pretty well. But I doubt everyone his age in Hollywood owes their careers to passing him on whatever project he is.”
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