Some actors are so annoyingly eccentric and bombastic it makes you wonder how they got this far in life with that level of disillusionment.
One actor that probably comes to mind is the former movie star, Jim Carrey, who is known for existential rants about how nothing is real. It’s this sort of godless behavior that seems to be a trend amongst many top actors in the industry, possibly due to being famous for a long time.
Another famous actor, Christian Bale, took it to a whole new level with who he thanked at the Golden Globes.
Christian Bale has been acting since he was a child in the 1980s when he scored a starring role in a Steven Spielberg film called Empire of the Sun. As he got older his performances only got better and he’s largely thought of one of the best actors working today – winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in David O. Russell’s The Fighter in 2011.
The British actor is one of those intensely private people and you might even forget that he had British accent until you see hear him talk at an awards show given that he mostly plays Americans in his movies.
Bale just snagged the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for his role as former Vice President Dick Cheney in the movie Vice.
The movie and Bale depict Cheney as an extremely evil person. In fact, most of the characters had a very sinister vibe to it, other than George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) who was just a buffoon.
That’s why the forty-four year old actor thought it would be a good idea to thank “Satan” for the inspiration to play the controversial role.
He said, “Thank you to Satan for giving me inspiration for playing this role.”
The irony though is perhaps when Bale discussed Cheney with Fox News at the premiere for the movie and surprisingly praised Cheney. He said, “He was a wonderful family man — he’s a great dad, he’s an avid reader, he has a brain like a vice and he constantly reads history. He was very laid-back. He would have been very happy to be a lineman in Wyoming if he hadn’t met Lynne, who said to him, ‘No, that doesn’t cut it. You need some ambition.’ What would have been if they hadn’t met?”
Bale also hypothesized that Cheney would probably like the movie and how he portrayed him.
The Vice star said, “I think he’ll certainly find it entertaining, at the very least. I think he’s very thick-skinned — you know. He has no remorse or regrets about what he’s done — he always says, ‘I would do it again in a minute.’ He doesn’t back down — he doesn’t apologize about anything. So, I think he’s a thick-skinned guy and I’d love to hear his thoughts. He’s a very intelligent individual, no matter what your thoughts are about him — he’s a smart cookie. So, I do hope so.”
If you haven’t seen the movie, they depict Cheney as a master manipulator. The best example of this is actually in the first scene of the trailer when then-Governor George W. Bush asks him to be “my Vice,” and Cheney says that position is traditionally a “symbolic job” where he says he’ll handle the “mundane jobs” like “overseeing bureaucracy, military, energy and foreign policy.”
The criticism of writer and director Adam McKay was that he definitely dumbed it down so it could be more accessible to the public. If he actually treated the audience like they were intelligent then it could’ve been a really great movie.
But he did and audiences were not so kind. Even liberals found the film over the top and maybe if your lead actor needs some inspiration from Satan, then it will likely be over the top.