CHRISTIAN BALE is on the cover of GQ magazine
By M.I.A on Feb 28, 2007 in CHRISTIAN BALE | | | Share This |
Christian Bale is on the cover the March issue of GQ magazine.
He also graces them of a very long interview.Here are the most revelant parts of it.
Unlike a lot of child stars, you’ve made a seamless transition to adult roles—and you’ve never gotten into any trouble with the law. But did growing up in the film business leave any kind of mark on you, do you think?
Quite frequently, I’ve been talking to somebody, telling a story, and then I realize halfway through, This didn’t happen. It can be anything. After a few years, you can’t differentiate between the clarity of something you’ve played and a real event. I find that funny. I have some friends who find it very sad and disturbing. Have you ever seen a movie called Ponette? If you want to see child acting—I mean, it’s disturbing how good it is. You have to worry about how they’re treating that young girl to elicit that performance from her, but it’s so good. There’s something just a little wrong about working professionally at that young an age. I appreciated it very much because it was a difficult time for my family, and I was able to help support them, and it actually was something of a salvation for us. But in a perfect world, I wouldn’t have started doing this at that age.
You’ve said that one reason you might have avoided the fates of other child stars of your era is that your first role was a character role, so you didn’t have to endure people rejecting you because you’d outgrown your cuteness. I wondered if you think living in Britain might have played a role, too. In America your classmates would have celebrated you, but it doesn’t seem like that happened to you in Britain.
Well, I can’t remember what I said that was true and what wasn’t true. When you’re doing these long days of press junkets, you kind of want to entertain yourself, and sometimes I’ve let other people guide the conversation. So they might say something like, “Oh, so you were bullied at school.” And I’m like, “Huh?” But I don’t say that. I go, “Yeah, yeah, it was really terrible.” Because you want to entertain yourself. I’m not a politician or something, so it doesn’t matter if I’m telling tall tales now and then. And there’s no maliciousness behind it; it’s purely that on that particular day, I was just bored with telling the real story.
Sissy Spacek once told me that she feels her performance in Badlands, her first featured role, represents the pinnacle of her career, precisely because she didn’t know anything about acting at the time. Is there a little bit of that for you with Empire of the Sun?
You can’t really compete with a first-timer. If you get a first-timer who is just really right there with the character, I don’t care who you are or how lauded an actor you are, you can’t compete with that. So what does that mean? I shouldn’t have ever done another performance and left it at that? No, I’m addicted, you know? But I recognize the nature of it. I do think that you ruin yourself. You’re making it harder for yourself with each and every movie that you do.
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