Christian Bale has said his “mortality is staring him in the face” after piling on the pounds and shedding weight for film roles.
The Dark Knight star is unrecognisable after gaining weight for his latest role as former US vice president Dick Cheney in Vice but has said the fluctuation has to stop.
He had previously gone through extreme weight gain for American Hustle and The Big Short, slimmed down to less than nine stone for The Machinist and bulked up to play Batman in the Dark Knight trilogy of films.
He told the Sunday Times’s Culture magazine: “I can’t keep doing it. I really can’t. My mortality is staring me in the face.”
During his transformation he phoned Gary Oldman to ask him how much weight he had put on for his Oscar-winning performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour and Oldman replied that he had not put on any weight.
Bale said: “By this time I’m 20lb in. I said, ‘Wait — none?’ I felt like such a tit, but I thought: I’m on this road; I’m going to keep going.”
He added that he feels sorry for his wife, the model Sibi Blazic, who has to put up with his changing saying: “No matter what happens, my wife’s seen it,” but said his new look found a fan in his son Joseph, four.
He said: “My son loved the tummy. He would just bounce up and down on that a lot and headbutt it and bounce off it and fall to the floor.”
Asked if he would play other politicians, such as Boris Johnson, he said his wife would veto the role: “She’d say: ‘No, we’re not having that one. He’s not coming in the house.’”
