Celebrity
Christian Bale Says ‘Any Role Anybody Gets, It’s Only Because Leonardo DiCaprio Passed’
“Do you know how grateful I am to get any damn thing?”
Christian Bale revealed that actors get sloppy seconds from Leonardo DiCaprio, and he wasn’t spared from it. The four-time Academy Award nominee spoke about how DiCaprio is someone most actors his age had gotten his sloppy second from in a rare interview with GQ magazine.
Notably was his iconic role as Patric Bateman in “American Psycho” from the year 2000, and he’s lost “at least five roles” to the man in the 1990s.
He revealed, “It’s not just me.”
“Any role that anybody gets, it’s only because he’s passed on it beforehand. It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you. It doesn’t matter how friendly you are with the directors. All those people that I’ve worked with multiple times, they all offered every one of those roles to him first.”
But this isn’t by any means him getting jealous of DiCaprio being favored in the Hollywood industry. He continued, “Literally, he gets to choose everything he does. And good for him, he’s phenomenal.”
Along with nailing the roles he took up were the exposures that come with it. And Bale couldn’t be grateful enough for DiCaprio to be in the limelight instead of him. He added, “Do you know how grateful I am to get any damn thing? I mean, I can’t do what he does. I wouldn’t want the exposure that he has either.”
“I would suspect that almost everybody of similar age to him in Hollywood owes their careers to him passing on whatever project it is.”
He went on to talk about how his motivation for filming came from his humble beginning. As a young man, he remembered his family’s house at the risk of getting repossessed, and they were scraping by. And when he was filming for “American Psycho,” he remembered making less than the makeup artists he worked with.
“I remember one time sitting in the makeup trailer, and the makeup artists were laughing at me because I was getting paid less than any of them. And so that was my motivation after that. Was just: ‘I got to get enough that the house doesn’t get repossessed.”
Now, he’s on a pleasant break from filming and is enjoying the extra time he has for himself. Bale said, “I find myself very happily not playing dress-up, not pretending to be somebody else for long lengths of time.”
