Christian Bale is an Academy Award-winning actor (who’s even played Batman, lest we forget), but according to him, Leonardo DiCaprio is a bigger deal. Bale recalled losing several roles to DiCaprio in a recent interview with GQ, even thanking him for passing on the roles he has secured.
“Look, to this day, any role that anybody gets, it’s only because he’s passed on it beforehand,” Bale said. “It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you. It doesn’t matter how friendly you are with the directors. All those people that I’ve worked with multiple times, they all offered every one of those roles to him first. Right? I had one of those people actually tell me that. So, thank you, Leo, because literally, he gets to choose everything he does. And good for him, he’s phenomenal.”
Bale even had the opportunity to star in Titanic before Leo got the classic role, but Patrick Bateman doesn’t seem to harbor any ill will toward Jack Dawson. “Do you know how grateful I am to get any damn thing?” Bale said. “I mean, I can’t do what he does. I wouldn’t want the exposure that he has either. And he does it magnificently. But I would suspect that almost everybody of similar age to him in Hollywood owes their careers to him passing on whatever project it is.”
Check out Bale’s complete GQ interview here. By 2022’s end, the actor will have starred in three films: Thor: Love and Thunder, Amsterdam, and The Pale Blue Eye. That’s plenty of content to choose from, but if you’d rather see Bale back in the Batsuit, he recently revealed his one condition for returning to the franchise: Christopher Nolan would have to get back in the director’s chair. As for DiCaprio, one role he hasn’t passed on is his upcoming turn in The Wager, another film from his frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese.