How Bradley Cooper was saved from insanity by Christian Bale
Even the most seasoned actors might find certain roles challenging, especially if their character is far removed from themselves. The difficulty of having to embody someone so different from yourself surely takes its toll on an actor, but luckily for Bradley Cooper, he found a solution for his struggles in Christian Bale.
Cooper and Bale starred in American Hustle together back in 2013, directed by David O. Russell, which allowed the former to discover the British star’s unique approach to acting. The film, which earned Bale a ‘Best Actor’ nomination at the Academy Awards, saw him play Irving Rosenfeld, a con artist, while Cooper, who also earned a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ nomination, played an FBI agent.
The movie was a great success, and it came to influence one of Cooper’s next projects – American Sniper. The Clint Eastwood-directed film saw the actor play Chris Kyle, a sniper who made military history with a staggering amount of confirmed kills. It was a difficult part for Cooper to try and embody, made even more difficult by the fact that Kyle was a real person who had actually experienced the events depicted in the film.
Thus, Cooper took inspiration from veteran method actor Bale to aid his performance, and evidently it worked – he earned a ‘Best Actor’ nomination from the Oscars for his portrayal of Kyle. Appearing on The Howard Stern Show, Cooper revealed how Bale would embody his character in American Hustle off-screen.
Cooper explained: “He’s reading it. He breaks into this guy, Irving Rosenfeld, who’s a Jewish guy from Long Island or the Bronx. He was in and out of the accent. And then the next day, he cuts his hair, he shaves his head. He’s gained all this weight already. And then the next day in rehearsal, all of a sudden, he’s just talking like Irving Rosenfeld.”
Thus, Bale was able to maintain a sense of dedication to his character, and Cooper found it easy to get into the mind of Kyle this way, too. “I would think how much energy I would be expending if I were my character. If I saw a cell phone, I would freak out. You know what I mean?,” he told Stern.
Bale’s long history of method acting has been rather controversial, although he doesn’t even believe that he is a ‘method actor’. He once told Movie Fone, “People often say, ‘Oh, Bale, he’s a method actor.’ I’m not a method actor. I would’ve had to train to do that. I just do whatever is necessary for each and every day.”
Yet, the actor stayed in character for much of the filming of 2000’s American Psycho, which saw him maintain the coldness of the psychopathic Patrick Bateman, much to the unease of some of his co-stars. Bale also has a habit of gaining or losing large amounts of weight for roles, like when he shed 62 pounds for The Machinist and put on 40 pounds for Vice.
