Matt Damon Felt Christian Bale Was the Better Actor for ‘The Fighter’
Matt Damon was once tapped to star in the movie The Fighter alongside Mark Wahlberg. He’d later drop out of the project, and Christian Bale would pick up the role. In hindsight, Damon Bale might’ve been better for the movie.
How Matt Damon felt about Christian Bale replacing him in ‘The Fighter’
Bale portrayed Mark Wahlberg’s brother in the sports movie The Fighter, which earned The Dark Knight star his first Oscar. He teamed up with David O. Russell for the feature, who he already had history working with. Before the movie ended up in Russell’s hands, however, Damon was supposed to play Bale’s critically praised role. Damon would later be phased out of the project during the script’s development. After seeing Bale’s performance, however, Damon believed everything worked out for the best.
“Matt Damon was gracious enough to say when I crossed paths with him recently, ‘This film again demonstrates that the right people play the right roles and make the right film at the right time,’” Damon once recalled in an interview with Ain’t It Cool News. “And I think that was his way of acknowledging that Christian played that role perhaps better than Matt Damon, who had been attached to it for some time, might have and that maybe I might as a director have done the best version of the picture. That was a compliment that meant a lot to me.”
Why Matt Damon left ‘The Fighter’
According to Damon, The Fighter was an entirely different film back when he first received the script. Wahlberg was still attached to the movie back then, but another director was tapped to helm the movie. Later, the Good Will Hunting star didn’t think the script was ready and needed further fine-tuning. So it seemed Damon simply wasn’t fond of doing a movie that seemed incomplete.
“The Fighter. I read the script because I thought it was fascinating, but the script was not very good. And we had a different director at the time. And Mark really wanted to do it and was so excited about it, but we all knew the script wasn’t there. Then David [O Russell] came in, rewrote the script, got Christian, and it was awesome,” he said in an interview with GQ.
Matt Damon found Christian Bale’s method acting inspiring
Bale has always been praised for the amount of dedication he puts into his craft. He’s often pushed himself to his mental and physical limits for the sake of his role. When Damon collaborated with Bale in Ford v Ferrari, he took a moment to applaud Bale’s work ethic.
“Christian’s approach is the approach that young actors wish they had when they’re talking s***: a monk-like discipline in service of your work. That’s one of the rarest things, because it comes at a price. It is inspiring,” Damon said.
Bale credited an older actor he used to work with in his younger years for unwittingly teaching him how to tap into his characters.
“See, I never trained,” Bale said. “And I’ve come to the realization recently… One of [my] first jobs ever was with Rowan Atkinson and I think I look at him as the template. He was playing…The Nerd, it was called, by Larry Shue. He would come out, we’d say hello, but he didn’t really socialize. None of us knew him – it was before he did Mr Bean. And he would just become this character, but before he went on stage. And I would just watch him; I would see him becoming a character. I was mesmerized. And then he just stayed in character for the whole night. And it wasn’t until the whole thing was finished that he invited me to say hello and that I actually spoke to him for the first time. It dawned on me that was my learning phase. I went, ‘Oh, that’s how it’s done then, is it? OK, great.'”
