Christian Bale dropped a serious amount of weight for one of his roles recently, even eclipsing the weight that he lost to act in The Machinist.
Bale is known for his massive fluctuations in weight, sticking on a load of bulk to play Batman, as well as famously appearing absolutely emaciated in Brad Anderson’s 2004 thriller The Machinist.
However, there’s another film in more recent memory that saw Bale undertake a more drastic transformation than ever before.
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Bale had to stick on a decent amount of weight for his role in Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney biopic Vice, choosing to do so by – in his words – ‘eating lots of pie’.
He reportedly gained over 100 pounds but then had to get rid of the weight in just a matter of months to make Ford vs Ferrari.
That film focused on the attempts made by Ford to design and build a car that could win them the 1966 Le Mans World Championship in France.
That 100 pounds that he added then lost eclipses even the stark transformation that he underwent for The Machinist, where he reportedly dropped 63 pounds in total to appear incredibly skinny and dangerously unwell.
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He’s committed to the craft, that’s for sure.
After undergoing similar transformations for The Big Short and American Hustle, it seems as if Bale has started to realise that he can’t keep on changing his weight so drastically all the time.
It ain’t good for you, after all.
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"I can't keep doing it. I really can't. My mortality is staring me in the face," he told the Sunday Times.
Whilst he was making one of his regular transformations for a role, Bale says he reached out to Gary Oldman to find out how much weight he put on for his role in Darkest Hour.
Oldman shocked him, telling him that he didn’t actually gain any weight.
Famously, his Winston Churchill get-up was a whole heap of padding and prosthetics, rather than Oldman’s own girth.
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Bale explained: "By this time I'm 20lb in.
“I said, 'Wait - none?' I felt like such a tit, but I thought: I'm on this road; I'm going to keep going."
He also admits to feeling sorry for his wife, model Sibi Blazic.
"No matter what happens, my wife's seen it,” he said.
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"My son loved the tummy. He would just bounce up and down on that a lot and headbutt it and bounce off it and fall to the floor."
As for whether he’d take on the role of someone like former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Bale said: "She'd say: 'No, we're not having that one. He's not coming in the house."'
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, Health
Tom Wood