Christian Bale Was Warned About Working With Russell Crowe in ‘3:10 to Yuma’
Christian Bale collaborated with Gladiator star Russell Crowe for the first time to do the western feature 3:10 to Yuma. But due to Crowe’s reputation at the time, Bale was advised to temper his expectations in regards to his partner.
Did Christian Bale get along with Russell Crowe in ‘3:10 to Yuma’?
Crowe was known to attract a lot of controversy during his earlier years in the film industry. His very candid and outspoken demeanor tended to cause problems on set, even occasionally butting heads with filmmakers for his beliefs. Crowe has acknowledged his short and sometimes self-destructive temper in the past. But he believed the source of it wasn’t necessarily bad.
“I’m a little bit intuitive, so I know from a handshake whether somebody means me good or ill,” Crowe once said according to Daily Mail. “And sometimes I don’t want to, once I know where they’re coming from, I don’t want to play that game anymore.”
Still, Crowe’s outbursts created the narrative that he was a difficult to work with. This made some warn Bale about acting alongside the Oscar-winner.
“Whenever people asked me what I was doing next, and I said I was going to be working with Russell, they kind of looked like [oh no], You’re going to be in for a tough ride with him. And it’s absolutely true,” Bale quipped to Collider.
But Bale quickly clarified that Crowe was more than a pleasure to team up with. The pair even bonded through their similar work ethic.
“No, Russell was, I don’t mean to talk out of school, but a lot of actors, they sort of complain and winge and do everything to avoid actually getting on with the work, you know, so it’s nice when you’re working with somebody like Russell where you can just get to the point and you can have blunt conversations about the scenes, and it just makes it easy,” Bale said.
Russell Crowe shared that his friendship with Christian Bale started when they first read together
Crowe and Bale hit it off almost immediately. Their initial table read showed Crowe that he and Bale had similar views on filmmaking, which made for a smoother collaboration.
“Our friendship, our relationship, however you wanna put it, started on day one of the reading,” Crowe once told MTV News. “It’s very easy in this business to miss the point of it. Some people can go into all these grand shapes and twists and forget that the simple thing is about learning your dialogue and inhabiting a character. It was very clear to me on day one of the reading that, not only did Christian have a sense of humor, but that he also respected the job.”
Bale agreed that he and Crowe were able to bring the best out of 3:10 to Yuma thanks to how synchronized they were.
“Any good actor can communicate very well by distilling the essence of what the movie really is,” Bale added. “[And two actors need to share] that common understanding. With Russell, that was bloody easy. … You can cut out all of the bulls***. [Looking at Crowe] The one thing I really hate — and I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this — but you sometimes get actors who’ll spend so long talking it out and complaining and blaming other people for stuff. Eventually, it makes you realize that maybe they’re just avoiding getting on with doing it.”
No one wanted to do a western with Russell Crowe and Christian bale
Despite the combined star-power of Crowe and the Dark Knight star, the film’s director James Mangold had a difficult time finding a studio for the project. He shopped it around several potential customers, but very few wanted anything to do with 3:10 to Yuma. But this was mostly because of the movie’s genre.
“I failed miserably to sell it,” Mangold once told Combustible Celluloid. “I went to every studio in town with Russell and Christian and this whole package and they all passed. We got financed by a bank. They sold it to Lionsgate while we were in production, but the fact is that I was an abysmal failure selling it. No one wants to make Westerns. It took dogged determination and my cast holding together as we went from one place to another and got handed our walking papers.”
