At the end of a warm spring day, as rays of amber sunlight flash off the ocean and the first early-evening drinkers begin to gather, Christian Bale arrives at a bar in Santa Monica. He’s wearing a baggy blue shirt, untucked, khaki pants, and New Balance sneakers. A black baseball cap is pulled low over his eyes, and the beginnings of a beard bristle along his jaw. He attracts little attention.

Apparently, despite having recently starred in a series of successful movies—including 3:10 to Yuma, The Prestige, and the lucratively resurrected Batman franchise (the second installment, The Dark Knight, comes out in July)—Bale stills finds it easy to go unrecognized. The Welsh-born actor, 34, has had only a few days’ formal training as an actor, in YMCA workshops as a child. But in the decades since he made his film debut in 1987, when, at 13, he starred in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, he’s developed an uncanny ability to disappear into roles.

Some of his transformations have been infamously extreme—losing 60 pounds to play the guilt-racked skeletal protagonist in 2004’s The Machinist, for example; others have been less demanding, like adopting an aggressive way of walking to play a Gulf War veteran in Harsh Times. His intensive approach hasn’t changed, despite the birth of his daughter (Bale and his wife, the former producer Sibi Blazic, were married in 2000), whom, at six months, he took deep into the Thai jungle while he worked on Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn. And his presence at the center of a vastly profitable series of superhero pictures isn’t indicative of a shift in attitude either. “I’ve never believed in being an ‘indie’ actor versus a ’studio movie’ actor—I’ve always liked the idea of doing all of it,” he says. As the sun sets, he sips from a bottle of Japanese beer. “I’ve always had,” he admits, “a slight sense of wanting to swim upstream.”

What did you think when you first saw yourself in the Batsuit?

I was standing on the back lot where they were creating the suit, and I had a few minutes to myself, staring up close in the mirror, just thinking, “This isn’t going to work. I’m claustrophobic, I can’t breathe, I’m getting a headache already, and this is all going to go very badly.”

What persuaded you otherwise?

I just said to myself, “Breathe deeply for a few minutes. Try this out. Don’t run around yelling and making an ass of yourself trying to pull the whole thing off.” I wasn’t going to get it off by myself. It takes three people. I just had flashes of what an asshole I would feel like saying “Well, I wasn’t able to play that character, because I panicked every time I got in the suit.”

You’ve played a wide variety of characters, but very few of them have been happy-go-lucky. Are you attracted to darkness?

Certainly I have no attraction to misery. I don’t intentionally go for dark. The only thing I would unequivocally say is that I have never had any interest in romantic comedy—I just couldn’t do it. I think I’d be terrible. And I think it’s an oxymoron, anyway. I’ve never found any of them funny.

Michael Caine has talked about the intensity of Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight. How did you find working with him?

He was incredibly intense in his performance but incredibly mellow and laid-back. Certainly there was this great anarchistic streak to it—just getting dirtier than anybody’s envisioned the Joker before. This character has power because he has no limits—absolutely nothing to lose.

How has Ledger’s death changed the way you look at the film?

Naturally it was something I wanted to share with him—and expected to do so. And I can’t do anything else but hope that it will be an absolutely appropriate celebration of his work.

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The Welsh-born star, who is soon to be seen in Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight, has already started shooting the first of those films, Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins.

“He’s really an actor’s actor, so we’re very proud,” said Victor Kubicek of film company Halcyon.  Charlie’s Angels director McG is directing the new film, which is due to be released on 22 May 2009.

“Christian was our first choice and he’s a big fan of The Terminator, so we’re very lucky,” Kubicek told the BBC at the Cannes Film Festival.

“But with Batman he’s already done the whole franchise thing, so we weren’t sure he’d respond.”

Luckily, said Kubicek’s business partner Derek Anderson, “he read the script and he loved it, so he’s signed on for all three.”

US rap star Common will also have a lead role in the film, as will Australian actor Sam Worthington, who will soon be seen in Titanic director James Cameron’s science-fiction epic Avatar.

The producers would not reveal whether Arnold Schwarzenegger would reprise his role as the Terminator. Nor would they discuss character names or plot details.

“We can’t talk about the story points at all,” said Kubicek, adding the project was being kept strictly under wraps.

“Not everyone gets to see the script. They only see the part of the script that’s relevant to the job they’re doing.”

But the producers promised not to disappoint fans of the time-travelling franchise, which has also spawned TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
“We’re both huge Terminator fans and we’re just approaching it from the point of view of what we’d like to see,” said Anderson.

“Any time we’re feeling pressure we just take a step back and say, as fans, ‘what would we like to see?’”

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Echoing what other friends and co-workers have said about Heath Ledger, Dark Knight star Christian Bale says the late actor was “a joy” to work with.

“You know, I don’t like kind of trivializing the tragedy in conjunction with an interview to do with the movie, which is clearly far less important. But Heath was a joy,” the actor tells Entertainment Weekly. “He really was like that, because he was a very unique man. I enjoyed watching him work, working with him.”

Bale, who plays Batman opposite Ledger’s Joker, says that he appreciated his costar’s professionalism and dedication to the comic book tale.

“What was so great to see with Heath is just how seriously he took it,” says Bale. “And we don’t mean in any way to sound sort of pretentious with that, but just in the fact that if we don’t take it seriously, then how can any audience ever take it seriously? And he did one hell of a job.”

After watching a recent Warner Bros. presentation with clips from the film, which hits theater July 18, Bale added, “It gave me goose bumps throughout, looking at Heath up there. And I just hope that this can celebrate him, celebrate his work.”

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Warner Bros. will premiere the McG-directed Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins on May 22, 2009, the start of Memorial Day weekend.

The movie, which stars Christian Bale (Sam Worthington is also in talks to star), will go up against Twentieth Century Fox’s Night at the Museum II: Escape From the Smithsonian, which also opens that weekend.

The project is the first in a planned trilogy that begins after Skynet destroyed much of the human race in a nuclear holocaust. John Connor (Bale) must lead a group of people to try and stop the machines.

The last Terminator movie, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, opened in 2003 and grossed $150.4 million domestically. Shooting on the new movie is scheduled to begin May 5 of this year.

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An adaptation of Bryan Burrough’s book “Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-43,” the Universal Pictures project follows the government’s attempt to stop the criminals John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd. Depp is playing Dillinger.

Bale would play Melvin Purvis, who led the FBI’s manhunt for Dillinger and captured more public enemies than any other agent in FBI history.

It was Purvis who uttered, “Stick ‘em up, Johnny” when he confronted Dillinger outside Chicago’s Biograph Theatre in 1934, moments before the gangster was shot dead by FBI agents. Ben Johnson played Purvis in the 1973 movie “Dillinger.”

Production is due to start later this winter in Chicago and other Midwest locales. The job is not expected to conflict with Bale’s commitment to play John Connor in the fourth “Terminator movie, “Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins,” which will follow “Enemies.”

Bale will next be seen in this summer’s Batman movie, “The Dark Knight.”

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The rumors have raged for the past few weeks but Hollywood Insider can now confirm that Christian Bale is set to star in the Terminator reboot…Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins. No official word yet on what role Bale will play in the film, which McG is directing and Halcyon is producing for Warner Bros. One source tells HI that the story line is a big departure from the originals starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Details are being kept so close to the vest that only a very few people have read the last ten pages of the script. All we know is that Bale is one valuable commodity to those folks at Warners.

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