When Christian Bale won the award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes for “Vice,” he thanked Satan for the inspiration to play the role. Given his character Dick Cheney’s track record under the Bush administration, it was apropos and hinted at just how far Bale went to bring the former Vice President to the screen with writer-director Adam McKay.
The actor is nearly unrecognizable as the power-hungry VP credited with pulling the puppet strings that shaped George W. Bush’s heavily criticized presidency and post-9/11 America. He not only nailed the notorious politician’s voice, cadence, and posturing, he gained 40 pounds and sat in the makeup chair for four hours daily to achieve the final product.
McKay, who also assisted Bale to his third Oscar nomination for “The Big Short,” wrote the part with the actor in mind, but the actor was admittedly hesitant when first approached. It felt like a stretch despite his reputation for undergoing dramatic transformations. It took months of research, working with the prosthetics team, and bulking up physically before he agreed to come on board. (The success or failure of the makeup was a sticking point for Bale, who says he spent a great deal of time when they weren’t filming touching his face and figuring out how it moved.)
When asked how he got into Cheney’s headspace, Bale speaks of the time he put into his preparation process: “You enjoy obsession like I do, and you sit for hours by yourself,” he said in a recent interview. “I read as much as I can and stare at photographs for hours on end, watch videos again and again and again. You just saturate your life with the person. You become a stalker, really.”
Bale doesn’t describe himself as a technical actor, relying instead on his vast knowledge of the person and staying in character even between takes to deliver a stellar performance.
“There’s a load of interviews with Mr. Cheney and I got every single one of them on my phone,” he told Screen Rant. “It’s just jam-packed full of videos of Cheney. And I’m just sitting there watching for hours and hours and hours. And imitating it and then walking around myself and trying to get the body position and all that.”
When it came to capturing Cheney’s voice, it was all in the breath for Bale. “That’s what I focus on a great deal,” he said. “You look at a character and you ask, ‘How do they breathe?’ What are their breathing patterns? Were they a smoker? Does their weight affect how they breathe, how they speak?”
These are the details that earned Bale his fourth Oscar nomination. We’ll see if they are enough to nab him a statue on Feb. 24.
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