Christian Bale's American Psycho Costars Initially Thought His Acting 'Was Terrible' While Filming

Christian Bale’s acting is so nuanced, sometimes it goes over his costars’ heads.

Josh Lucas and Chloe Sevigny, who starred with Bale, 50, in 2000’s American Psycho, recently told Vanity Fair they assumed his choices were “terrible” in the early stages of filming.

“I don’t know if you felt this way,” Lucas, 52, told Sevigny, 49, in their joint interview held 25 years after the movie’s release. “But I actually truly remember thinking that Christian Bale was terrible.”

Lucas played Craig McDermott, a rival colleague of Bale's investment banker Patrick Bateman. In director and co-writer Mary Harron’s adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel, Bale’s sinister character —who may or may not be a serial killer —satirizes 1980s white-collar American culture and consumerism.

“I remember the first scene I did with him, I watched him and he seemed so false,” recalled Lucas, adding, “I now realize that it was this just f---ing brilliant choice that he was making... I didn’t realize what a subversive comedy it was. I didn’t realize the way that Mary was going to turn it on its head.”

“I don’t think that I thought he was bad,” responded Sevigny with a laugh. “I was just kind of confused, like, Why aren’t you being social?” 

Describing Bale’s “challenging” American Psycho process, the Boys Don’t Cry Oscar nominee said, “I’m very gregarious and silly and goofy, unbeknownst to the general public. When people -

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take themselves so seriously, I kind of shut down, even though I take my work very seriously and I love acting and whatnot.”

Sevigny, who played Jean, the secretary of Bale’s character, added that she felt “really intimidated” by the leading man. “I wanted a little more generosity to make myself feel more at ease, which is my own ego.”

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For Lucas, who “thought it was bogus acting at the time, but was exactly the opposite,” he came to see the eventually Oscar-winning British star as “an actor who was at such a completely different level already, and that he was capable of having these crazy layers going on in what he was doing.”

Sevigny also brought up the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio had at one point been attached to play Patrick. Of the cult classic, she said, “I didn’t know it was going to become what it did and have the legs that it has had.”

Among Lucas’ recent projects is the Kristen Wiig-led Apple TV+ comedy Palm Royale. Sevigny stars as C. Z. Guest in FX’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, and will next appear as Kitty Menendez in another Ryan Murphy-created series, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story.

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