Christian Bale Once Shared Hank Williams Inspired Him to Lose Weight in ‘The Machinist’
Christian Bale lost a tremendous amount of weight to portray his character in The Machinist. But after reading the script, he’d later find inspiration for his weight loss in late country music star Hank Williams.
How a photo of Hank Williams inspired Christian Bale
Christian Bale went to extreme lengths to capture his Machinist character. In the 2004 film, he played a malnourished blue-collar worker experiencing a possible psychotic break. When he read the script, he already began envisioning what this character would look like in his head. And it soon became important for the Oscar winner to appear beyond unhealthy for the sake of the role.
“The more I read the script the more I realized this doesn’t work unless he looks like he’s at death’s door,” Bale once said according to Contact Music. “He can’t look like he’s a little bit skinny. You go out in the street – not so much in the States but in the rest of the world – half the people are a little bit skinny. This had to be someone you looked at and thought, there’s something wrong there.”
Legendary late singer Hank Williams gave Bale the blueprint for what he might look like in The Machinist. Williams was a late country singer who died at a very young age. He was known for his alcohol addiction almost as much as he was known for his music. The singer ended up in jail after disorderly conduct due to his alcoholism. There was a photograph of Williams being released from jail that became a template for Bale’s Machinist physique.
“I had a nice photograph of Hank Williams, taken when he was 29 and getting released from jail, about three months before he died. The guy looks like he’s about 60 – emaciated, very poor condition,” Bale said. “I blew that up and had it on the front of my script. That was what I was going to aim for.”
What was Christian Bale’s diet for ‘The Machinist’?
Bale applied a very strict regimen on himself to achieve the hollow look he had in The Machinist. The option of using special effects for his gaunt look was on the table. But Bale rejected the idea to maintain authenticity.
“You know, a number of people said to me, ‘Well why didn’t you just leave it to CGI or whatever?’ I don’t know, I don’t have enough faith in CGI really for doing that. And I enjoyed the challenge and the slightly self-destructive urges involved in losing that amount of weight,” Bale once told Radio Free.
So Bale opted to eat as little as possible. Even in scenes when his character was shown eating, Bale stuck to his diet on set.
“My daily thing was generally like a bit of a coffee and an apple if I felt like it,” he added. “Well, I had to eat the pie in the scene, and then there was a scene eating chicken as well. But I tried not to swallow. Because it’s amazing how you can literally just have a couple of bites of something and your face will expand again if you’re really at that low point. To keep that really sunken look, you’ve got to be eating practically nothing.”
Although it was both mentally and physically taxing at first, Bale confided that the weight loss had a very relaxing effect.
“It ended up being a very nice place mentally to be when you get that skinny. Man, you’re calm, you know? Because you just can’t waste any energy whatsoever. So you just do what’s necessary. I was incredibly happy. Other people probably couldn’t have told that because I didn’t really have the energy to smile too much for them. But inside, I was genuinely probably more content for a longer period of time than I’ve ever been in my entire life,” he said.
