7 Times Christian Bale Completely Transformed For a Movie Role

Although he doesn't look too unusual at first glance, Bale's American Psycho character was actually one of his most physically demanding roles.

"My role for American Psycho was my most restrictive diet-wise. There were no cheat meals. It was all lean protein. No sugars, good fats, and low carbs," he told Train in 2017.

Bale's physique wasn't the only way he transformed his body for the creepy thriller. To portray Patrick Bateman, the overly buff symbol of 1980s excess, he told The Guardian that he even got caps on his teeth to make them look "perfect."

"I liked my old teeth. I have a molding of them on a shelf. But with Patrick Bateman, his physicality is much more important than with most characters. He deals totally in the superficial, and he's incredibly narcissistic. I looked at myself in the mirror and it just wasn't right. I was warned that if I got caps I could get a lisp, and you might still be able to tell in close-up. So I thought, I like my teeth, but I'm not so attached to them that I'm going to ruin this whole movie because I refuse to get them done."

For this movie about an insomniac machine worker whose past trauma has left him paranoid and unable to sleep, Bale shed about 60 pounds to depict the emaciated, physically shrinking character — but, as he told Star2, he didn't go about it in a healthy way. When he tried it again for a later role, it caught up to him.

"When I did The Machinist, I came up with the absolutely brilliant method of just smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey to lose weight.

But then when I tried it once again in my 40s, that didn't work quite as well. I was waking up with heart palpitations and just not feeling right at all."

Bale had to switch gears pretty quickly after wrapping The Machinist to pack on some pounds of muscle for Batman Begins, the 2005 entry into the Christopher Nolan-helmed Dark Knight trilogy. In an interview with the BBC, Bale talked through the requirements — not just for getting a superhero physique, but building the stamina to act in the heavy Batsuit.

"I had to put on a great deal of weight, which was necessary for the character," he said. "He has no superpowers so you have to believe he's capable of this. I kind of knew I could do it. I think Chris [Nolan, director] was probably worrying far more than me. I was talking to him one time on the telephone whilst we were doing The Machinist and he'd say, 'How're you looking these days?'"

"It was frankly pathetic," Bale continued. "I was down to 121 pounds and I couldn't do a single push-up — this is maybe not the guy you want to cast as Batman. But we had enough time. It was an arduous journey to get there, but I managed to get into appropriate shape by the time we started filming."

As a fighter pilot tortured and kept prisoner during the Vietnam War, Bale had to transform his body while staying in shape for the more action-oriented parts of the movie. Despite this, he expressed frustration when talking to the AV Club about how the physical challenges of the shoot took most of the attention during the press junket.

"With Rescue Dawn, people asked me various questions on [the physicality], and I attempted to steer them back toward the movie as a whole, rather than any one particular point about the movie. Because otherwise, unfortunately, it could end up seeming like some kind of a gimmick.

In an interview with Collider, director Werner Herzog revealed that he had lost some weight in solidarity with Bale's regimen.

"When Christian lost weight, I said to him, 'Christian, out of solidarity I'm losing half the amount of pounds that you are losing,' and I actually did."

The 2010 fighter/family drama The Fighter ultimately won Bale his first Oscar, thanks to his role as Dicky Ecklund. To play the former fighter turned drug addict, Bale underwent a physical transformation once again. This time, though, he didn't resort to extreme measures, as Collider reported.

"I felt so good and calm with playing Dickie and I was just running like crazy," Bale said. "I could just run for hours on end and I felt really healthy. I don't know. Usually I always say how I do a lot of coke whenever I lose weight. I'm not sure if that's so funny for this movie but there's not a whole lot of secrets to it. But one really good thing is to have this particular water, Aqua Hydrate . . . That helped me to lose weight and I run a lot."

Bale's transformation for American Hustle took him in the opposite direction of most of his physical roles up to this point. Where he previously needed to lose weight or put on muscle, his sleazy character required weight gain — and not in the muscular superhero way.

"I ate lots of doughnuts, a whole lot of cheeseburgers and whatever I could get my hands on. I literally ate anything that came my way," Bale explained his weight gain to People. "I was about 185 and went up to 228. I'm still working it off." He even shaved his hair off for the character, whose use of toupees is a running visual gag in the film.

Playing former vice president Dick Cheney in Vice just might be Bale's biggest physical transformation yet. Bale had the help of prosthetics and makeup to completely disappear, but he had to do some of the work himself too — most notably gaining about 40 pounds. On the red carpet, he told E! a few details about the physical preparation.

"I tend to be quite habitual. Eggs and rice—that was it," he said. "But it ended up sort of 15 eggs on a bowl of rice. It was that enjoyment of being full nonstop, but it gets quite sickening after a while you know? Your back goes out and all sorts of other things but that all helped with playing [the role]."