On Sunday night, after winning a Golden Globe for playing former Vice-President Dick Cheney in the film “Vice,” actor Christian Bale decided to curry favor with the typically Hollywood leftist crowd, saying Satan was his inspiration for playing Cheney and suggesting the next “charisma-free a**h***” he could play would be Senate GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
First Bale thanked the director of “Vice,” Adam McKay, saying, “Thank you to that geezer, Adam. He said I’ve got to find somebody who can be absolutely charisma-free and reviled by everybody, so he went, ‘Oh, it’s gotta be Bale in it.’ Thank you.”
Then he chortled, “And for all the competition, I will be cornering the market on charisma-free a**h***s. What do you think, Mitch McConnell next? That could be good, couldn’t it? Thank you to Satan for giving me inspiration on how to play this role.”
As Christian Toto, editor of HollywoodInToto.com, told NBC News, “’Vice’ is a cartoonishly biased film, and it took a movie that could have been compelling and turned it into a simplistic screed. Bale’s speech is icing on the cake. These award shows are not even meant to entertain anymore, they seem to be meant to scold and lecture.”
What is quite interesting, though, is that Bale seems to change his tune to please his audience. At the Golden Globes, he slammed McConnell and cited Satan as his inspiration to play Cheney. Yet when he was interviewed by Fox News in mid-December for the movie’s premiere, he was effusive in his praise for Cheney, saying:
He was a wonderful family man — he’s a great dad, he’s an avid reader, he has a brain like a vice and he constantly reads history. He was very laid-back. He would have been very happy to be a lineman in Wyoming if he hadn’t met Lynne, who said to him, ‘”No, that doesn’t cut it. You need some ambition.” What would have been if they hadn’t met?”
Bale continued that he thought Cheney would have a sense of humor about the film, opining, “I think he’ll certainly find it entertaining, at the very least. I think he’s very thick-skinned — you know. He has no remorse or regrets about what he’s done — he always says, ‘I would do it again in a minute.’ He doesn’t back down — he doesn’t apologize about anything. So, I think he’s a thick-skinned guy and I’d love to hear his thoughts. He’s a very intelligent individual, no matter what your thoughts are about him — he’s a smart cookie. So, I do hope so.”
With McKay, though, there’s no doubt about how he holds Cheney and President George W. Bush in contempt; asked whether his film was a comedy or drama, he replied:
It’s a tricky thing, given what is going on in the world right now and you see the suffering that resulted from that era with Cheney and Bush. Yet, at the same time, we’re living with it now. The means that got us there are so ridiculous. The idea that George W. Bush, when he left college, worked for a tropical plant company and he had a 10-year gap in his employment history and we elected him President is ridiculous. And the idea that Cheney knew that this was an opportunity for power is undeniably funny.
Video of Bale below: