Christian Bale has revealed his thought process behind taking the role of John Conner in Terminator Salvation, saying he did so partly out of spite.
2009’s Terminator Salvation was perhaps best known for Christian Bale’s infamous on set rant and for not performing particularly well with audiences.
Bale has now revealed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Indiewire) that he had once rejected the part multiple times after souring on the project due to the Writer’s Strike.
“I said ‘no’ three times. I thought that the franchise – I went, ‘Nah, there’s no story there.’ I’d seen the first one and enjoyed that back in England, I’d been to the movies and seen the second one. 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 and then got called away for a prior commitment that he had. It’s a great thorn in my side, because I wish we could have reinvigorated that, and unfortunately during production you could tell that wasn’t happening. It’s a great shame.
“There’s also a perverse side to me where, people were telling me 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 verbalizing 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, too.”
It’s certainly an interesting reason to make a movie, and not a mistake the actor will likely make again. It would, however, have been interesting to see Jonah Nolan’s take on the film, with the two having worked together previously on The Prestige and The Dark Knight.
SEE ALSO: Christian Bale has not seen The Dark Knight Rises since the Aurora shooting
