Christian Bale is doing press rounds for his new film Out of the Furnace and in an interview with MTV the conversation inevitably turned to Batman and his performance in Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight trilogy.
The conversation first touches on the “BatKid” phenomenon that recently swept up the nation followed by Bale’s thoughts on Ben Affleck taking over the role in Batman vs. Superman to which he said:
“I wish him all the best. He’s a very experienced actor and filmmaker and he’ll make it his own. Our thing’s finished, we’ve always declared it’s finished and it should be passed on to another actor and it will be again after him. The only thing I said to him is just make sure you can take a piss without anyone having to help him. Because it’s a little humiliating, at least what I went through, when you have to have someone help you out of the costume. That was my main piece of advice for him.”
[amz asin=”B00DUCXFUC” size=”small”]Following that, Bale was asked about the audition footage that was included on the recently released [amazon asin=”B00DUCXFUC” text=”The Dark Knight Trilogy: Ultimate Collector’s Edition”] that showed Bale in Val Kilmer‘s Batsuit and how he’d used the gravelly voice for Batman from the very beginning:
“I got there. They put me in Val Kilmer’s suit. It didn’t even fit properly, and I stood in it and I went ‘I feel like an idiot.’ What kind of guy walks around and dresses like a bat? And is then going to go ‘Hello, how are you? Just ignore that I’m dressed as a bat.’
“Of course, he’s meant to be doing this. You look at the history of the guy and the pain that he went through. I went ‘I can’t do this in a normal voice. I have to become a beast in order to sell this to myself. I went home that evening, and my wife said, ‘How’d it go?’ I went, ‘I kind of did this.’ I showed her, and she went, ‘Oh, you fucked that one up, didn’t you? You did.’ So thank God they went for it.
“It ain’t for everybody. Ben’s obviously going to have to do his own thing, but it was the only way that I could find how to get into that and to justify wearing the fricking Batsuit. Walking around like that– Otherwise, he’s just loopy beyond belief. He’s loopy, weird, but with a method to his madness.”
You can watch a snippet from the interview directly below.
via Dark Horizons
