Christian Bale: ‘I was mediator on set of American Hustle’

5 October 2022

Christian Bale says he was a “mediator” on the tense set of ‘American Hustle’.

Christian Bale says he was a “mediator” on the tense set of ‘American Hustle’

He confirmed in the new issue of GQ he stepped in between his co-star in the 2013 crime thriller, actress Amy Adams, 48, and its 64-year-old director David O Russell.

Christian, 48, spoke out years after a leaked email from a WikiLeaks hack on Sony alleged David had “abused” Amy to the point where the ‘Batman’ actor intervened.

He said: “If I can have some sense of understanding of where it’s coming from, then I do tend to attempt to be a mediator.

“That’s just in my nature, to try to say, ‘Hey, come on, let’s go and sit down and figure that out. There’s gotta be a way of making this all work’.”

Amy has spoken about feeling “devastated” on the set of the film for “most” of her days on the project, and said about David: “He was hard on me, that’s for sure. It was a lot.”

Accounts of Christian’s efforts to ease tensions came to light in 2015 after WikiLeaks published hacked Sony emails.

They included a message from Jonathan Alter, then chief executive of Sony,

who said David “grabbed one guy by the collar, cursed out people repeatedly in front of others and so abused Amy Adams that Christian Bale got in his face and told him to stop acting like an a******”.

Despite Christian saying it is in his nature to be a peacemaker, he went viral in 2009 after a leaked audio recording was leaked of him screaming at a cinematographer on ‘Terminator: Salvation’ while filming a scene.

Claiming he was being distracted, Christian yelled at him: “Am I gonna walk around and rip your f****** lights down? In the middle of a scene?

“Then why the f*** are you walking right through? ‘Oh, dah-dah, dah-dah’, like this in the background. What the f*** is it with you?

“You are trashing my scene! You do it one more f****** time, and I ain’t walking on this set if you're still hired. I’m f****** serious.”

Christian later said he had acted like a “punk” and said he had made up with the cinematographer.