Christian Bale Explains Why He Agreed To Star In Terminator: Salvation

Christian Bale has been discussing what made him want to star in McG’s Terminator: Salvation and looks back on the movie.

Christian Bale has been talking a lot recently about his past endeavours. He’s currently promoting his movie Hostiles yet he’s not one who’s afraid of talking about his past as well as his present and future. He recently spoke about what it was like playing Batman and revealed that he hasn’t seen Ben Affleck’s portrayal of the character. He’s also been discussing his time on McG’s Terminator: Salvation on the podcast Happy Sad Confused and explained why he agreed to the take the role in the first place.

Bale began by revealing that he had actually turned down the role three times before finally accepting it. He then recalled that “it was an unfortunate series of events involving the writers’ strike, involving Jonah Nolan, who was able to come on, and really start to write a wonderful script, but then got called away for a prior commitment that he had”.

Things seemingly just got worse for the project. “I wish we could have reinvigorated [the franchise]. And unfortunately, during production, you could tell that wasn’t happening. It’s a great shame.”

Christian Bale as John Connor in Termination: Salvation

“There’s a perverse side to me, where people were telling me that, there’s no way on God’s Earth that I should take that role, and I was thinking the same thing. But when people started verbalising that to me, I started to go oh really? All right, well watch this then. So there was a little bit of that involved in the choice.”

Bale then went on to talk about the infamous incident where he shouted at the film’s director of photography, Shane Hurlbut. He described it as a “great learning lesson for me.”

“Do you remember that scene with Linda Hamilton where she’s really going nuts in Terminator 2? We said, we’ve got to channel that at some point in the film, and that was the scene in which we were channelling it. Great lesson for me of, no matter how much you lose yourself in a scene, you do not allow yourself to behave that way. And yeah, of course, I’ve got enormous regrets about it,” finished Bale.

You can currently see Bale in action in Hostiles which is currently in cinemas.