The Best Christian Bale Performances (That Aren't Batman) Ranked
Whether you love him for his roles or loathe him for his extra curricular antics, Christian Bale has consistently proven himself to be one of the best actors of his generation.
As known for those preternatural skills as for his sometimes spiky persona, the Welsh-born star has put together a formidable body of work defined by his intensity, physical transformations, and unshakable dedication to the craft.
When all is said and done, his performances as Batman in Christopher Nolan’s endlessly influential Dark Knight trilogy will likely be the first things that come to most people’s minds, but the actor has excelled across a remarkable range of movies and genres since breaking onto the scene in Steven Spielberg’s WWII epic, Empire of the Sun, almost 40 years ago.
Since then, he’s played the lead on more than a few occasions but has arguably done his best work in supporting roles — either as the foil, the villain, or the unlikely best friend to a more straightforward protagonist, but always elevating the project in the process.
With Bale once again swinging for the rafters with a key supporting turn in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! earlier this year, what better time to take a look over the greatest performances of his career — at least, the ones that don’t take place in Gotham.
Bale received his fourth (and most recent) Oscar nomination for playing Dick Cheney in Adam McKay’s Vice, but his Oscar-nominated supporting turn in the director’s previous film was, I think, even better.
The Big Short is a fast-talking movie about the 2008 financial crash which manages to explain what happened in that chaotic moment with such entertaining flair that you almost don’t stop to think about the ramifications until the credits ominously roll. The cast is of course absolutely stacked, but with only a few scenes as the unkempt, heavy-metal drumming, financial-soothsayer Michael Burry, Bale manages to steal the show.
Given his famously touchy personality, it’s almost strange that Bale hasn’t played too many larger-than-life villains in his career. The biggest he’s gone, in that specific area, was with his incredible display as Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder — a performance that was, I think it’s fair to say, easily the best part of that uneven movie.
For the role, the actor followed in the footsteps of other great MCU villain performances, like Josh Brolin’s Thanos in Endgame and Cate Blanchett's Hela in Ragnarok; yet even though Love and Thunder, of course, wasn’t on the same level, Bale’s performance wasn’t far off.
Alongside David O. Russell and Christopher Nolan, James Mangold has probably been Bale’s most fruitful collaborator. Their first movie together was 3:10 to Yuma, a revisionist Western that pitted Bale’s ranchman against a dangerous outlaw played by Russel Crowe.
Any showdown between the two actors (who were both arguably in their prime at that time) was going to be worth the entry, but thanks to Mangold’s skilled and steady hand as a filmmaker, that solid premise became a home run. It was simply a case of bad luck that the movie came out around the same time as There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men — in any other year, it would have felt like a landmark for the genre.
It’s a little unlucky for Bale that his sole starring turn for Terrence Mallick came in Knight of Cups, a movie which is fairly average, at best. Regardless, he brought enough class and edge to the director’s The New World — a transcendent 2005 update on Pocahontas (funnily enough, Bale also voiced Thomas in the Disney film) — that we can safely include at least one of their collaborations on this list.
Coming just a few years after The Thin Red Line, the movie was the director’s second outing since taking a 17 year hiatus after Days of Heaven. Thanks to the presence of the now legendary DP Emmanuel Lubezki, it set the tone for the work that the filmmaker went on to produce with movies like The Tree of Life.
At age thirteen, on the recommendation of director Steven Spielberg’s then-wife, Amy Irving, Christian Bale was chosen from a pool of 4000 young actors for the lead role in Empire of the Sun — at which point a star was very much born.
Adapted from J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical book of the same name, the movie follows a young English boy living in Shanghai at the start of the Second World War, who ends up in a Japanese POW camp. It’s fair to say, Empire of the Sun is not exactly remembered as a Spielberg classic, but there is plenty of Spielberg magic to enjoy in it — especially in the second half — and if you’re a fan of the actor’s work in general, you’ll get a kick out of seeing how naturally gifted he was from the get-go.
We might not be able to mention Bale’s Batman movies on this list, but we can certainly make room for the actor’s supporting turn in Nolan’s wonderfully rewatchable dueling magician movie, The Prestige.
Set in London around the end of the 20th century, the plot operates a bit like Miloš Forman’s Amadeus, with Hugh Jackman playing the jealous and obsessive Salieri to Bale’s naturally talented Mozart — you know, except with magic… and David Bowie!
I might be on my own with this one, but I think Bale’s performance as the British driving legend Ken Miles in Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari is (potential spoiler for this list) the best thing he’s done in the last ten years.
The movie itself is, like any Mangold movie really, a rock solid piece of Hollywood entertainment — a sports movie with a whole load of pleasing character arcs and hard fought personal victories, a central friendship you can really root for and, thanks to Bale’s performance, a genuinely spiky anti-hero in Miles. If you liked F1, I think this movie is possibly twice as good.
If you’ve ever seen a meme about Christian Bale, or one of those carousels of images on Instagram, it likely had something to do with the actor’s many remarkable body transformations over the years. His most extreme, and most famous, was how he dropped to just 120 pounds for The Machinist in 2004 before working himself back up to 220 within a few months to shoot Batman Begins.
The drop for David O. Russell’s Boston-set sports movie The Fighter wasn’t quite so crazy (he lost 30 pounds or so for the role in between playing the caped crusader in the second and third Batman movies), but I think the wider movie and performance have aged a lot better. For his role as Dicky Ward, the brother and trainer of Mark Wahlburg’s boxer Micky, Bale rightly won his first (and still only) Oscar. He and O. Russell would go on to work together on American Hustle and Amsterdam, but this debut collaboration remains their best.
It’s unsurprising that the top two performances on this list came in movies where Bale was able to bring the crazed magnetism of his best supporting roles to center stage. The more recent of the two was 2006’s Rescue Dawn, which was perhaps Werner Herzog’s last great narrative feature — though of course, there’s time for that to change.
Perhaps it helped that the director was adapting one of his own documentaries, Little Dieter Needs to Fly — which is also one of the most beloved of the director’s early non-fiction work. The stranger-than-fiction tale follows a German-born U.S. pilot who was shot down and imprisoned in a POW camp during the Vietnam war. If you’re a fan of Herzog’s narrative work on movies like Bad Lieutenant or Aguirre, this one is just as unhinged, just as playful, and similarly great.
And speaking of harnessing the actor’s wilder side for a lead role, nobody to date has managed to do more with Bale’s unique talents than Mary Harron did on American Psycho — a movie that somehow manages to get better and better with age.
Written by Bret Easton Ellis, this story of a deranged New York stockbroker’s (potentially real) killing spree has gone from being seen as a provocative cult favorite to something of a satirical masterpiece and bonafide modern classic. If, for some reason, you’ve yet to see it, imagine The Wolf of Wall Street meets The Shining, and you’ll have an idea of the kind of crazy ride in store.
