He has battled villains the Joker, the Penguin and Ra’s al Ghul and saved the city of Gotham countless times, but Christian Bale has told incoming Batman Ben Affleck that the hardest thing about playing the caped crusader is going to the toilet.
Bale, who became one of Hollywood’s best-known stars during his three-film run as the DC Comics superhero, was asked if he had offered any advice to Affleck in the wake of the latter’s casting in the upcoming Superman vs Batman movie. His advice: avoid getting caught short in the Batsuit.
“The only thing I said to him was to make sure to [be able to] take a p*** without having anyone help him, because it’s a little bit humiliating,” Bale told Access Hollywood during promotional duties for his new film Out of the Furnace. “You have to have someone help you out of the costume in order to be able to do that. So that was my main piece of advice for him.”
In a separate interview for MTV, Bale revealed he came up with the deep-throated growl adopted by Batman during the Christopher Nolan years in order to help lose himself in the role.
“They put me in Val Kilmer’s suit,” said the Oscar-winner of his audition. “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, dressed 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. If 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.’ And I showed her, and she went, ‘Oh, you [expletive] that one up, didn’t you?’ Thank God they went for it. [The voice] 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. Otherwise, he’s just loopy beyond belief. He’s loopy, but he’s loopy with a method to his madness.”
Bale also praised “Batkid”, aka five-year-old leukaemia survivor Miles Scott. He said the tiny superhero, who saved the city of San Francisco on Friday as part of a huge endeavour by the Make-A-Wish foundation, proved the enduring nature of the character.
“You look at this kid, Batkid. That gives the whole point. It doesn’t matter which actor is playing him. He’s a symbol. He’s so much bigger than any actor. That’s all. This little kid, he doesn’t really care which actor’s playing him. It’s the symbol of the whole thing, and that’s what makes the character so fantastic. I look forward to seeing what Ben will do with it.”
