Christian Bale has blasted former “Batman” George Clooney for “whining” about being hounded by paparazzi.
In a WSJ magazine cover story, Bale calls Clooney’s complaints “boring,” adding, “It doesn’t matter that he talks about it. It’s like, ‘Come on, guys, just shut up. Just get on with it and live your lives and stop whining about it.’ I prefer not to whine about it.”
Bale — who manages to keep his personal life with wife Sibi Blazic out of the spotlight — has a reputation for being hot-headed, but avoids confrontations with photographers.
“I would go to work; she would leave the hotel. There would be a man who stood outside . . . and say the most obscene things imaginable to my wife . . . I know what he’s after; he has a strategy there. Am I able to say I’m not gonna give him that satisfaction of angry Christian Bale coming after this man? But equally, he’s killing my humanity and my dignity as a husband if I do not, and he knows this. So you’ve got a choice.”
Bale also reveals that when Leonardo DiCaprio was offered the lead in the 2000 film of “American Psycho,” then-lesser-known Bale never gave up prodding eventual director, Mary Harron to play the part. “I just pretended [DiCaprio getting the role] didn’t happen,” Bale recalls. “I still kept going down to the gym every day because I was going, ‘Oh, I’m making the film.’ I would call Mary Harron … And she’d go, ‘Christian, can you please leave me alone?’”
The “Exodus: Gods and Kings” star says of the horrific Aurora, Colo., movie theater massacre during a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises”: “That haunts me to this day, haunts all of us who were involved. I know it haunts Chris [Nolan] as well, because we were stuck in a hotel in France when it happened.”