News culture Coffee, a can of tuna and an apple… This was Christian Bale's diet for this role: he scared the producers of the film
Published on 03/25/2024 at 07:55
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Being an actor means using your drama skills to bring a fictional character to life in front of a camera and other actors. But, to physically embody a fictional person, some actors are able to transform themselves to offer even more credibility. And in this area, the king is Christian Bale.
Christian Bale: spectacular physical transformations
It is very common in cinema that, for a given role, actors and actresses follow special diets, intended to prepare them for the task that awaits them or to get closer to an expected aspect. Some physical modifications involve intensive training to gain muscle, others are of the order of a few kilos at most, in one direction or the other. But some actors have largely pushed their limits, as is the case for Christian Bale, capable of changing completely for a role. We saw him extremely sharp to play Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy, then gain nearly 40 kilos in order to play Dick Cheney in Adama McKay's biopic dedicated to the former vice-president of the United States of America entitled Vice.
We also remember his appearance in Thor: Love and Thunder, where the actor plays the sickly Gorr, also nicknamed the Butcher of the Gods. Physical transformations that impress as much as they worry. These changes are in fact real shocks for the body, and it is more than recommended to be so brutal with your body when everything is going well from a health point of view. Fortunately for him, Christian Bale seems to have a metabolism which, for the moment, has not caused him any major problems. However, he worried producers, directors, his relatives and colleagues more than once, as was the case during the filming of The Machinist.
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No matter the size of the project, this actor puts his body to the test
Directed by Brad Anderson, written by Scott Kosa and released in 2004, The Machinist follows in the footsteps of Trevor Reznik, a worker suffering from serious sleep disorders. Totally insomniac, he claims not to have slept for a year and is responsible for an accident that affected one of his colleagues. His lack of sleep makes him almost paranoid, and he suffers significant visual and auditory hallucinations. In short, Trevor Reznik is not doing well at all. To prepare for this role, Christian Bale, as usual, began an extremely strict diet to lose 25 kilos very quickly.
According to information from Men's Health magazine, Christian Bale only “nourished” himself in the following way during the entire pre-production phase: a coffee, a can of tuna and an apple per day. A diet that expert Daniel O'Shaughnessy comments on, explaining that “it represents less than 200 calories per day”, and that it is an unhealthy diet, capable of wreak havoc on metabolism while subjecting the body to enormous stress. In 2019, before beginning a new transformation to play Gorr, Christan Bale spoke about his many diets at the microphone of E! :
I've become a little more boring now, because I'm older and I feel like if I keep doing what I did in the past, I'm going to die. I can't keep doing this. I really can not. My own mortality lies before me.
It is true that apart from Gorr, the actor seems to have calmed down a little on that side. With a budget of 5 million dollars, The Machinist grossed around 8 million. A small production, even for the time, in which Christan Bale finds himself alongside Jennifer Jason Leigh, John Sharian, Aitan Sanchez-Gijon, Michael Ironside and Lawrence Gilliard Jr.
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