For an award-winning actor like Christian Bale, appearing on an MCU set and having to deal with the shenanigans of being a supervillain must have been quite a novel experience, though it seems that the Thor: Love and Thunder star found the whole setup a bit too monotonous for his liking.
In another recent interview, Bale admitted playing Gorr the Bod Butcher was a hell of a lot easier than his time portraying the Dark Knight in Christopher Nolan’s cinematic trilogy, but it looks like that’s where the advantages reach their tail end.
Chatting with Variety and addressing just how method you can get when playing a character like Gorr in the interconnected narrative of Marvel, Bale said that the whole set experience was a “monotony” because you can’t differentiate one day from the next.
“‘That’s the first time I’ve done that,’ he explained. ‘I mean, the definition of it is monotony. You’ve got good people. You’ve got other actors who are far more experienced at it than me. Can you differentiate one day from the next? No. Absolutely not. You have no idea what to do. I couldn’t even differentiate one stage from the next. They kept saying, ‘You’re on Stage Three.’ Well, it’s like, ‘Which one is that?’ ‘The blue one.’ They’re like, ‘Yeah. But you’re on Stage Seven.’ ‘Which one is that?’ ‘The blue one.’ I was like, ‘Uh, where?'”
While Love and Thunder has gone down as one MCU’s weaker movies by far, there’s a sense of unanimity among fans and critics alike that Christian Bale absolutely knocked it out of the park as Gorr. He’s certainly among the movie’s handful of hits, when everyone would tell you that its misses far outweigh them. We’d even go so far as to say that Gorr pretty much redeems the movie and makes the two hour you spend on it worthwhile, if little else.
For Gorr, there might be no return to the MCU, but with the introduction of the multiverse, and at such a canon-breaking scale, is it much of a stretch to assume that the villain, or some variant of him, might make a comeback somewhere down the line?
One thing’s for certain; fans will definitely root for that probability.