Christian Bale’s Inspiration For American Psycho’s ‘Patrick Bateman’ Was Tom Cruise! Here’s How The ‘Stylish & S*xy’ Actor Inspired This Helluva Serious Role
When Christian Bale took inspiration from Tom Cruise to play Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Read more!
When American Psycho’s Director Revealed That Christian Bale Took Inspiration From Tom Cruise For His Serial Killer Character (Picture Credit: Wikimedia)
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Christian Bale has done some phenomenal movies in his career, including the Dark Knight trilogy, The Machinist, The Prestige and more. But his character of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho is one of a kind. He executed the role with so much precision and authenticity that it is still difficult to look at the star without getting reminded of the lethal serial killer. While there are several stories related to the making of the film, there’s one that’s quite peculiar. Scroll on to learn more.
The movie was adapted from a novel of the same name. It is a known fact that Christian wanted the role at any cost and was quite obsessed with it. He even rejected many other roles to star in American Psycho. Interestingly, instead of doing workshops and understanding serial killers, he took inspiration from an unlikely source – one of the biggest actors in Hollywood, Tom Cruise!
As surprising (and worrisome) as it may sound, but Christain Bale took inspiration from Tom to nail his role in American Psycho. While talking to BlackBook once, director Mary Harron revealed how the actor decided to nail his character. She said, “We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me, and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.”
Of course, the ‘inspiration’ had nothing to do with Christain Bale’s Patrik’s violent nature. It probably had more to do with the intensity with which he talked about his stories, work and anything he was passionate about. It was genuine yet forced, borderline aggressive and charismatic in a dangerous way. A lot of how Tom Cruise presents his stories.
In fact, a YouTube page called Random Access Memes shared a clip from the interview that Mary Harron was probably talking about. In the video, Cruise explained how he stopped the oxygen supply on a flight which made a passenger faint. The weird bit was, that he laughed during the entire narration, which irked the netizens, and they ironically called him ‘American Psycho’ in the comment section.
One wrote, “He’s literally laughing hysterically about making someone lose consciousness… using that Scientology brain like always.”
Another said, “The emptiness behind his eyes while maintaining a level of chivalry is chlling”
A user added, “You can feel the emptiness”
The last one wrote, “He’s kinda creepy tbh”
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