Josh Lucas thought Christian Bale was a “terrible” actor when the two first worked together on “American Psycho.”
During an interview with Vanity Fair alongside Chloë Sevigny, another “American Psycho” alum, Lucas admitted that he didn’t fully grasp Bale’s take on iconic character Patrick Bateman until later.
“I don’t know if you felt this way, but I actually truly remember thinking that Christian Bale was terrible,” Lucas said. “I remember the first scene I did with him, I watched him and he seemed so false — and I now realize that it was this just fucking brilliant choice that he was making. That was an actor who was at such a completely different level already, and that he was capable of having these crazy layers going on in what he was doing. I thought it was bogus acting at the time, but was exactly the opposite.”
Bale led the 2000 feature as a satirized version of an ’80s Wall Street broker. Lucas and Jared Leto played Bale’s onscreen cronies and competitors, while Sevigny was Bale’s secretary.
“I didn’t realize what a subversive comedy it was,” Lucas said. “I didn’t realize the way that [director] Mary [Harron] was going to turn it on its head.”
Lucas even recalled the advice co-star Willem Dafoe gave him on set.
“‘American Psycho’ was a very, very early film for me, and I was fucking nervous,” Lucas said. “Back then, making ‘American Psycho,’ I felt like there was a group of people like you who had really deserved and earned their way into great filmmaking, and I sure felt like I was a newbie — and a nervous newbie, to say the least. […] The day I met you, Chloë, I got into the car with Willem Dafoe and I was honestly shaking. I said to him, ‘Man, I’m so nervous,’ and he turned around and he just gave me this great look and he was like, ‘Man, if you’re not nervous, something’s wrong.’ I’ve kind of maintained that every day.”
Lucas wasn’t the only Bale skeptic. Bale has said the studio needed convincing to even let him take over the role after Leonardo DiCaprio infamously turned it down.
“Nobody wanted me to do it except the director. So they said they would only make it if they could pay me that amount,” Bale said in a GQ cover story. “I was prepping for it when other people were playing the part. I was still prepping for it. And, you know, it moved on. I lost my mind. But I won it back.”
Bale continued, “In honesty, the first thing was that I’d taken so long trying to do it, and they had paid me the absolute minimum they were legally allowed to pay me. And I had a house that I was sharing with my dad and my sister and that was getting repossessed. So the first thing was, ‘Holy crap. I’ve got to get a bit of money,’ because I’ve got ‘American Psycho’ done, but I remember one time sitting in the makeup trailer and the makeup artists were laughing at me because I was getting paid less than any of them. And so that was my motivation after that, was just, ‘I got to get enough that the house doesn’t get repossessed.’”
