Christian Bale Was Once Concerned About Working With Jennifer Lawrence in ‘American Hustle’
Christian Bale collaborated with Jennifer Lawrence on the 2013 feature American Hustle. But initially, Bale had a few concerns working with an actor as young as her.
Christian Bale felt acting with Jennifer Lawrence might have given him much more work to do as an actor
When Bale first heard that Lawrence was being considered as his co-star, he predicted that he’d have a few issues with the casting. The actor received word that Lawrence was in the running by the film’s director David O. Russell. But initially, Bale mistook Lawrence for another megastar. Russell texted Bale that he had an actor nicknamed ‘J-LA’ in mind for the movie. Bale thought Russell meant J-Lo, as in Jennifer Lopez.
“Jennifer Lopez! And I think, J-Lo? I just can’t picture that. That’s a real surprise,” Bale once said according to The Inquirer. “I never would have imagined J-Lo. So, I text him back, `J-Lo?’ ‘No, J-Law, Ok, right?’”
After the clarification, however, Bale expressed some concern over working alongside the Oscar-winner. Her age at the time would’ve meant major changes for his character.
“In so many films, there’s this expectation that you’re going to get these older actors with these very young actresses, as though that’s the most perfectly normal thing in the world,” he said. “And I thought, that changes everything about Irv. In a way, he’s abusing this young woman– and having an affair on the side. And I’m starting to find it so tricky, that I’m playing this con man in the first place, and I do find him charming, but this relationship seems like it’s giving me so much more work.”
But after filming Lawrence on-screen, Bale was convinced his onscreen relationship with his co-star would work.
Jennifer Lawrence shared working with Christian Bale changed her approach to acting
Collaborating with Bale proved to be an enlightening experience for Lawrence. Although she’d worked with many top actors in her field, she was wary about performing alongside method actors.
“I would have no idea how to talk to them,” Lawrence said in an interview with Hot Ones. “Do I have to be in character? That would make me nervous. I haven’t seen another [acting] process that I’ve been curious about. You don’t know about them all the time.”
Some consider Bale to be one of cinema’s most dedicated method-actors because of the extreme lengths he’s gone to in order to embody characters. But according to Lawrence, Bale’s method acting might have been less extreme than she expected. The actor didn’t stay in character 24/7 like others such as Daniel Day-Lewis have been known to do. This gave her a new perspective on her own acting abilities.
“I had always been very on-off, on-off until I did American Hustle and worked with Christian Bale,” Lawrence said. “I noticed when the camera started rolling and the crew started preparing, like 10 seconds to action, he would start getting ready. I saw that and thought, ‘That seems like a really good idea.’ So I started doing that.”
Jennifer Lawrence joked that she popped a lot of mints before kissing Christian Bale
Lawrence once joked that she took vastly different approaches when kissing actors like Christian Bale and her Hunger Games co-star Liam Hemsworth. For Bale, Lawrence made sure to leave a good impression, whereas she quipped she didn’t give Hemsworth the same treatment.
“When I had to kiss Josh and Liam in The Hunger Games, I was like, ‘Who cares?’ and I’d eat mustard and tuna,” she quips. “And then I did American Hustle with Christian Bale and I was like, ‘Oh damn,’ and I was really clean and ate lots and lots of mints,” she once said on The Graham Norton Show (via Yahoo).
