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.”
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