Christian Bale: 'Between films, I want to look like a lazy person who doesn't give a s**t'

Christian Bale as a slacker? That just doesn't sit right.

The British actor is famed for his exacting transformations, spending months inhabiting his characters. He dropped 62lbs to play an insomniac in The Machinist and endured a similar weight loss for his drug addict ex-boxer in The Fighter, the film that won him an Oscar. On American Psycho, he got his teeth capped to play Wall Street maniac Patrick Bateman, while Vice saw him gorge on pies to become former US vice president, Dick Cheney. But when he's not working, it's a different matter.

"In between, I’m a sloth," says the 48-year-old when we meet in London's Corinthia Hotel. "And I don't like to work that much if I can avoid it." As a rule of thumb, he only takes one movie a year. But 2022 has been different. He made his bow in the Marvel universe, starring as the tragic villain Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder. He sang with Taylor Swift in the all-star flop Amsterdam. And now he's the lead in Netflix-backed, Edgar Allan Poe-inspired, period detective yarn The Pale Blue Eye.

"I do feel like having done three films, everyone needs a bit of time away from me," he says, wincing at the thought of how visible he is right now. "It's an interesting thing. I have many friends who are absolutely obsessed. And I like to get obsessed, I really do. But I don't just get obsessed about films. I have friends… they would love to just be on a film set their entire life. Whereas for me, I really like to get away from them."

Bale's phone goes off – it's his young son, Rex, calling. He’d much rather be talking to him than me, though he's too polite to say so. This year, he's been doing too much yakking to the press for his liking. Committing to all three projects – which all got bunched up due to the pandemic – has clearly eaten into his valuable time at home with wife, Sibi, and kids Emmeline, 17, and Joseph (aka Rex) whom he sweetly nicknames "Banana" and "Burrito".

In The Pale Blue Eye, Bale plays Augustus Landor, a detective hired to investigate a grisly murder at West Point, the famed US military academy. "I’ve always really liked these 1830s, dark, atmospheric, pre-electricity crime thriller pieces," he says. Based on the book by Louis Bayard, the story sees the fictional Landor meet the young Poe (Harry Melling), who famously attended West Point before he became the influential writer of such Gothic classics as The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher.

With Landor traumatised by personal loss, "the character I play is like one of the original hard-boiled detectives", Bale notes. Featuring an eccentric British support cast – Toby Jones, Timothy Spall and Gillian Anderson all pop up – it's also an unusual attempt to draw the character of Poe into a mystery that feels exactly like one he would’ve written. "It's a fascinating look at how Poe became the Poe that everyone came to know: the godfather of detective fiction and the macabre."

The story also triggered something in Bale, kindling memories of his childhood. Born in Wales, to Jenny (a circus performer) and David (a commercial pilot), he grew up in Bournemouth, after spells in Portugal and Oxfordshire. As a kid, Bale gorged on Hammer Horror movies. "I enjoyed scaring myself," he grins. "Even though it's not exactly what we were going for, there was something very Hammer House [of Horror] about it, something a little bit armchair thriller."

Would he have done a Hammer movie if he was acting in the 60s, the peak of the brand's popularity? "I would love to have done." He did get to work with Christopher Lee on a 1990 version of Treasure Island, in which the veteran actor played Blind Pew. "I’d grown up watching him as Dracula. Just being always the creepy dude. For me, it was Christopher Lee and Vincent Price. So it was fantastic to get to work with him."

He was 15 then and had already starred in Steven Spielberg's Second World War drama Empire of the Sun, and, on stage, alongside Rowan Atkinson, in The Nerd. "I didn't really train. I did a couple of weekends at the YMCA. That was my training – watching other actors actually doing it." Atkinson's influence was immense. Same goes for Lee and garrulous co-star Oliver Reed on Treasure Island. And in 1992's Newsies, he got to work with Robert Duvall, "one of the finest actors around", who appears briefly in The Pale Blue Eye.

But the fame brought on by Spielberg's film didn't sit easily with him – the media attention was too much to bear. Children at school taunted him, and he notoriously skipped out of the press junket in Paris, heading down the Champs–Élysées, after spending most of the afternoon giving uncooperative interviews. Today, dressed in navy casuals, he's anything but monosyllabic. The voice may be quiet, a whispering growl like the one he perfected playing Batman for Christopher Nolan, but it's punctuated by roars of laughter.

Clearly, those early years formed a blueprint. He's an actor, not a celebrity. Forget parties and premieres, he’d rather be at home repairing blown fuses or sump pumps. "I do enjoy doing all that stuff," he says. "I guess it's because… when you do a job, the first thing you do, you go to work and you go to makeup and hair. Right? Then in between time, you just want to f**king look like a totally lazy, neglectful person who doesn't give a s**t about [appearance]… but who actually can fix things. It's nice to be able to do that, right?"

These past few years, Bale has fused his need for practicality with creativity, stepping behind the camera. He's credited as a producer on The Pale Blue Eye and 1930s-set romantic adventure Amsterdam, which he helped develop with writer-director David O Russell. Despite its astounding A-List cast – including Robert De Niro, Rami Malek, Margot Robbie, and Taylor Swift – the film underperformed, taking just $31m when it came out. "I think it's actually a real gem of a film," he counters. "I do maintain that [it] will be discovered, hopefully, for years to come, quietly in people's living rooms."

If they do, they’ll find one scene with Bale singing alongside Swift. When his daughter discovered this, she was taken aback. "I think she just felt sorry for Taylor. That was really what it was. It was less kind of, ‘No way!’ It was more, ‘Why?’ Because she hears me singing. I like to sing a lot. So she knows I’m not a very good singer. I like it, but my enthusiasm is much greater than my ability. And I realised that when David asked me to shut up and just let Taylor sing… suddenly you go, ‘Oh, yeah, she really knows what she's doing, don't she?’"

Perhaps he could come on stage at one of her concerts, I suggest, for a guest spot. "We all have those dreams!" he replies. Still, Bale has played musicians before – notably Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, when he was the singer in his Christian era and sang "Pressing On". "I love that song. And I got to perform that and that's addictive. It's something else. I was performing in front of 20 people in some community hall somewhere, but it doesn't matter. You’re like, ‘Oh, woah!’ What an addiction!"

Is there any singer he's got his heart set on playing? "I guess just growing up in the era that I did, it would always be pretty interesting to play Shaun Ryder. He was great. Man, I remember, I’ve seen him a bunch of times, and he would just stop the concert and get it wrong. And he didn't give a crap!"

It's a lovely thought, Bale playing the lead singer of the Happy Mondays. Maybe he could direct it, too – he's yet to dip his feet into directing. He's "not certain" he wants to, he says.

"I kind of like being in cahoots with the director, ahead of filming, and then once you start filming, I get to go into my bubble of playing the role. I don't know how I would multitask. I don't like it that much." What about just directing and not acting? "That is an option," he ponders. "I’m just not sure that anyone would let me."

The Pale Blue Eye is in cinemas now and on Netflix from 6 January