For years, Christian Bale has been sacrificing his metabolism for the greater moviemaking good. To play an emaciated insomniac in 2004s The Machinist, the actor dropped a reported 60 pounds, only to regain the weight—and build Bruce Wayne-appropriate muscle mass—in the six months before filming his first scenes for Batman Begins. He has yo-yoed between American Psycho lean and American Hustle paunch. But even given that history, Bales forthcoming portrayal of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney may be the actors most haunting transformation yet.
Bale might not seem like the obvious casting choice for Cheney. Hes 44, English, and, well, Christian Bale. Cheney, meanwhile, is 77, American, and his silhouette is more Penguin than Batman. But Oscar-winning filmmaker Adam McKay knew after directing Bale in The Big Short that he would be perfect to play the former veep in Vice, a comedic biopic that follows Cheney at two distinct points in his career.
“What Christian Bale really does is he psychologically breaks someone apart and puts them back together again,” McKay told Deadline. “Ive never seen someone work so hard at it, and it is hard on him, but really amazing to watch. The second I thought of doing the movie, I knew right away, the most exciting person to play him is Christian.”
Vice, which opens in theaters this Christmas, tracks Cheneys under-the-radar rise from bureaucratic Washington insider to the most powerful man in the world as vice president to George W. Bush, reshaping the country and the globe in ways that still reverberate today. The film reunites Bale with Amy Adams, his co-star in The Fighter and American Hustle, who plays Lynne Cheney, and features several other A-listers as Bush-era heavy hitters, including Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld; Sam Rockwell as Bush; Bill Pullman as Nelson Rockefeller; and Tyler Perry as Colin Powell.
To shape-shift accordingly, Bale has said that he shaved his head, bleached his eyebrows, and gained 40 pounds. (Co-star Carell also said that Bale did specific exercises to thicken his neck.) This January, Bale waved off any praise for the extreme character-preparation, telling Yahoo that he was just trying to provide “a blank canvas through which these incredible [hair and makeup] artists could create the various ages of Cheney. . . . They would shave my head every day, bleach and pluck eyebrows.”
Further details of the film have largely been kept under wraps—which seems fitting, given the private nature of Vices subject. Last year, while discussing the research that went into the Vice script, McKay noted that Cheney is “a very secretive guy, so one of the big things with this script has been to really read every single thing thats out there. I compare it to radio telescopy, where you kind of look at the gravitational pull on one star and go, Wait a minute, there must be something there thats causing that . . . Its really like detective work. . . . So theres just been a lot of minutiae and details that were constantly sifting through to try and put this story together. We know a lot about him, but theres a lot most people dont know, and its pretty jaw-dropping.”
Bale, meanwhile, has said that Vice is not a straightforward biopic, that it alternates comedic moments with drama. “Its taken as much research as Ive ever had to do for any other film,” the actor told Interview. “Adam likes a lot of improvisation, and when youre playing Mr. Cheney, you need to not only speak in the vernacular that he would speak in, but all the policies that he would be aware of and instances of them, the abbreviations for all of them, and be able to just go with it. So it was very fascinating for me.”
So, why tackle Cheney now? As McKay told Deadline in 2017, “A lot of crazy stuff happened during those eight years, and this is a vital puzzle piece in what got us to this moment with Donald Trump, with the world, as it is now, and Dick Cheney is at the center of it. He was one of the most powerful leaders in American history, and quietly had a bigger effect on global events and the shape of the current world than just about anyone around.”
And in a new, exclusive statement to Vanity Fair, McKay got a little more poetic while explaining why Cheneys story is still crucially relevant to the current political climate. “America didnt get to the delightful place were at today by accident,” he said. “Someone had to crack the safe first. Someone who understood power and how to manipulate it. Someone no one would notice. An ultimate insider who knew every trick in the book.”
Get Vanity Fairs HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Julie MillerJulie Miller is a Senior Hollywood writer for Vanity Fairs website.
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