American Psycho was a breakthrough for Christian Bale, who turns 50 today.
Here are 10 facts about the film.
Christian Bale Wasn’t Sure American Psycho Was Supposed to Be Funny
When director and co-writer Mary Harron first sent Christian Bale the script for American Psycho, he didn’t know much about it — except that it was based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel that made people mad.
“I had no idea what to expect. I had not read the book at that time. I had heard of the controversy, people calling for it to be banned, and I was not expecting what I read,” Bale told MovieMaker for an oral history of the film in 2020. “As I read it, I was exploding with laughter. And I didn’t know if that was Mary’s intent.”
Bale proceeded with caution: “I spoke with her on the phone, and I said, ‘I’ve just got to get this over with, because this might end our conversation and insult you. But I find this to be one of the most ridiculous and hilarious scripts.’ And she went, ‘Bingo. That’s it. Please fly out to meet me.’”
Christian Bale Unnerved Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis met with American Psycho director Mary Harron and Christian Bale when Bale was in contention for the role of Wall Street serial killer Patrick Bateman, and recalls that Bale arrived looking and acting just like his literary creation.
Ellis told us: “He was in full Patrick Bateman mode in terms of the hair, the suit and the way he was talking. And it was incredibly distracting. And amusing, but then it became less amusing as he kept it going…
“I told him, at a certain point, you know you can stop this. It’s unnerving me. But jokingly. It was kind of like — it was unnerving in a way. I felt he didn’t need to keep it up, though I think he’s just that kind of actor.”
Other Actors Thought Bale Was ‘The Worst Actor They’d Ever Seen’
Christian Bale also told us, in 2020, that when he worked with fellow American Psycho veteran Josh Lucas on 2019’s Ford v. Ferrari, Lucas “informed me that all of the other actors thought that I was the worst actor they’d ever seen.”
An amused Bale added: “He was telling me they kept looking at me and talking about me, saying, ‘Why did Mary fight for this guy? He’s terrible.’ And it wasn’t until he saw the film that he changed his mind. And I was in the dark completely about that critique.”
Mary Harron Quit Over Leonardo DiCaprio
You may know that Leonardo DiCaprio, hot off Titanic, nearly got the role over Christian Bale. But you may not know that American Psycho director Mary Harron quit the project rather than work with DiCaprio, because she deeply believed that Bale was the right actor for the role of Patrick Bateman.
“Obviously, I think DiCaprio’s a great actor, but I thought he was wrong for it,” Harron told MovieMaker. “I thought Christian was better for it, and I also thought, and I think my instinct was right on this, he carried enormous baggage because he had just come off Titanic and I thought you cannot take someone who has a worldwide fanbase of 15-year-old girls, 14-year-olds girls, and cast him as Patrick Bateman.
“It’ll be intolerable, and everyone will interfere, and everyone will be terrified. … It would be very bad for him and very bad for the movie. Because everybody will be all over it. They’ll rewrite the script and all the rest. And I knew I could only make this work if I had complete control over it, over the tone and everything.”
Eventually, Bale and Harron got to make the movie they wanted to make. And as Bret Easton Ellis told MovieMaker, DiCaprio later got to play another Wall Street antihero: “Of course Leo got to play a version of this as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, and he was spectacular.”
At One Point, Oliver Stone Was Going to Direct
Stone was briefly attached to the film when Harron quit over DiCaprio’s casting. Bret Easton Ellis told MovieMaker:
“I think I would have regretted it if Oliver Stone had made it with him. I don’t think Oliver Stone would have been the right director for this at all. Something about Mary’s style—the restraint she showed—is what makes the movie effective.
“I don’t think Oliver Stone is good at restraint. … And I don’t know if Leo, who is the greatest screen actor of his generation, would have survived it. And I know that Leo really, really wanted to do it and I know he was talked out of it.”
American Psycho Cut a Lot
Once the movie started shooting in Toronto, Harron filmed some scenes everyone knew the MPAA would object to. Chloe Sevigny recalls:
“I remember us shooting things that were more extreme so they could have that in the film to take out, and being like, ‘Hmm, that’s cool, that’s good. That’s a good strategy.’
“The ’90s were a constant battle with the censors, the ratings board was such a big thing then—or it was just the movies I was making.”
Christian Bale Can Sweat on Cue
“We were filming the business-card scene and I remember that Josh Lucas and Justin Theroux came up to me after one of the takes and said he breaks into a sweat at the same time… every time,” Mary Harron told MovieMaker.
Christian Bale Avoided the Other American Psycho Actors
Chloe Sevigny recalled: “Working with Christian was pretty hard because I didn’t know this whole Method thing. I was pretty fresh. I hadn’t done that many films before, and that an actor would lose himself to such a degree and was so consumed by the part, I was having a hard time kind of… just wanting to socialize with him, but feeling that he didn’t, and then my ego being like, ‘Does he not like me? Does he think I’m a terrible actress?’”
She wasn’t alone. Guinevere Turner, who co-wrote the film with Harron and plays Elizabeth: “He was just so 100 percent committed as an actor to being this character, to a disturbing point. He never spoke in his real accent and he never socialized with anyone while we were shooting.”
Bale confirms he kept to himself: “Yeah. I start laughing if I know people too well. I start laughing in the middle of scenes. Especially with a character like that.” Interestingly, Bale may still continue that approach: He told IndieWire that he had to stop hanging out with Chris Rock on the set of his last film, Amsterdam:
“Chris is so bloody funny and I found that I couldn’t act, because I was just becoming Christian laughing at Chris Rock.” When shooting wrapped, Sevigny met the real Bale: “When we were not shooting, doing press and stuff, he couldn’t have been a nicer guy,” she said.
Willem Dafoe Had It Both Ways
Dafoe’s character, Detective Donald Kimbal, is investigating the murders that Patrick Bateman appears to have committed. Did he suspect Bateman? It depends.
American Psycho actress and co-writer Guinevere Turner told Moviemaker in 2020: “A cool thing that Mary told me relatively recently is that in the scene where the detective that Willem plays and Christian are having lunch at Smith & Wollensky’s — and it’s really tense, and Bateman’s sort of losing his mind — she directed Willem to do several takes where he was sure that Patrick had done it and then several takes where he absolutely didn’t think he’d done it. And then she intercut the two styles. That, I think, is genius.”
Dafoe loved it. He told MovieMaker: “I remember her telling me to play it those different ways. And then she cut it together in a way that was ambiguous where she kind of had her cake and ate it too. … That lifted up the scene.”
No Encore
Bret Easton Ellis revealed on a recent episode of his podcast that Bale was asked to appear in the 2002 Roger Avery film The Rules of Attraction, based on Ellis’ second novel. (Though American Psycho was Ellis’ third book, it was made into a film before his second.)
One of the characters in Rules of Attraction is Sean Bateman (played in the film by James Van Der Beek), who is Patrick Bateman’s brother. At one point, Avery planned for The Rules of Attraction to include a scene with Sean and Patrick Bateman together, with Bale reprising his American Psycho role. Lionsgate, which released both films, loved the idea.
“He asked Christian Bale to do it, Christian said no. Then he asked me to do it. I said absolutely not,” laughed Ellis. “And then he changed it to just a phone call between Patrick and the brother.”
Main image: Christian Bale in American Psycho. Lionsgate.