God love him, he's apologized for it, but this very NSFW rant is worth revisiting, even after all the remixes, mash-ups and laughs at his expense, because I think he almost broke his brain:
Bear with me for a sec... what do you notice about the way he is speaking? His accent... what kind of accent is that? Did he drop character and speak with his normal accent? Nope. Bale is from Wales. Then was it the American accent of his character John Connor? I've heard Bale do a much better American accent than that. Remember, he played Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, and his accent was flawless in that film.
My jokey theory is that the reason he is speaking in a half-British/half-American accent is that in his rage, he somehow got lost halfway between Welsh actor Christian Bale and American resistance leader and Terminator-slayer John Connor. In other words, he was for several scary moments both Bale and Connor! This is frightening.
In all seriousness though, you hear about these so-called “method” guys all the time: like how Daniel Day Lewis walks around in character 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on those rare occasions when he takes a part, or how De Niro put on seventy pounds of weight to play a fat, old Jake Lamotta in the final scene of Raging bull. These stories are the stuff of legend. Thing is, contrary to popular belief, the “method” isn’t really about “becoming” a character temporarily… it is about drawing on your own real emotions or experiences to “interpret” a character.
The way it has been explained to me is that whereas an instinctive actor will, in the context of their performance, determine the emotion their character needs to display (i.e. “sadness”) at a particular moment, given the plot and circumstances, and will attempt to approximate a reasonable facsimile of the emotion (“look sad”) through expressions and behaviour, an actor trained in Konstantin Stanislavski’s method goes a whole different route.
The "method actor" will use things like sense and memory, tapping into their own very real emotions (“feel sad”) to achieve a greater degree of realism. When you hear a rant like this, you can't help but wonder if guys like Bale may be taking things a step too far in their desire to really inhabit a part and do justice to whatever role they take on. Anyone who has read about the
Does that mean that the crew need to be on tenterhooks around someone like Christian Bale when he is doing his thing in a scene that calls for him to “feel angry”… I think his angry tirade is proof that you do.
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Update: I made some edits put up a spoiler warning for the link to the Wired blog because it is SPOILERTASTIC... seriously, don't go there unless you are willing to have major plot points of Terminator Salvation revealed to you. One of the posters in the comments section calls the Wired editor who posted the article a "Clownshoe" for not providing a spoiler warning. I'm just not sure I can deal with being called a Clownshoe, so you've been warned.
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