Christian Bale says he owes his career to Leonardo DiCaprio, who rejected roles he ended up playing: “Thank you, Leo.”
In a new interview with GQ, Christian Bale jokes that he owes his success to Leonardo DiCaprio, who turned down roles in now-legendary films, thus allowing him to audition and land them himself.
“Look, to this day, any role that anybody gets, it’s only because he’s passed on it beforehand,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you. It doesn’t matter how friendly you are with the directors. All those people that I’ve worked with multiple times, they all offered every one of those roles to him first.”
One specific role that catapulted Christian Bale into ultimate Hollywood stardom was ‘Patrick Bateman’ in the cult-classic 2000 horror movie, American Psycho. Reportedly, it was first offered to none other than Leonardo Dicaprio, who ended up ditching the project due to alleged creative conflicts.
Despite Leo being the favoured choice in the early stages of production, Christian Bale holds no resentment: “Do you know how grateful I am to get any damn thing? I mean, I can’t do what he does,” he explains to GQ. “I wouldn’t want the exposure that he has either. And he does it magnificently. But I would suspect that almost everybody of similar age to him in Hollywood owes their careers to him passing on whatever project it is.” Bale concludes, “so, thank you, Leo, because literally, he gets to choose everything he does. And good for him, he’s phenomenal.”
