4) Rescue Dawn
Bale is renowned for his commitment to his craft, and arguably no role has required more from him than his lead in Rescue Dawn. Werner Herzog’s Vietnam war drama asks Bale lose an unhealthy amount of weight, along with eating live creepy crawlies, being dunked into a narrow well and almost drowned, and being dragged by his feet down a street behind buffalo.
Stunts alone don’t make a great performance, however – becoming a character via the Method, though, can. As Dieter Dengler, the US navy pilot captured by Pathet Lao soldiers in 1966, Bale drops the trademark intensity to play a thoroughly decent, resilient man. As Dengler, Bale is uncharacteristically uncomplicated and upbeat. The change-up brings out the good nature in an actor who so rarely chooses to display it.
3) Empire Of The Sun
Bale’s earliest starring role (not to mention his first ever movie role) is still one of his best precisely because he’s so lacking in self-consciousness. This is Bale before he caught the method bug, before he decided he was going to go it full-time and become one of cinema’s biggest stars. Aged just 13, in Steven Spielberg’s WWII-set mini-epic Empire of the Sun, Bale is heartbreakingly real.
In Empire, there are already signs of the transformations to come – Bale going from a healthy, uppity tot at the beginning of the film, to a wiry early-teen by the end. It’s not just the physical change that impresses: even at 13, Bale knew how to convincingly turn a character’s personality, here from an entitled brat to a humbled and resourceful wild child over the course of the movie.
Simply put, it’s one of the all-time great child performances.