8 Little Known Tics In Christian Bale's Performance That Made American Psycho's Patrick Bateman Epic
6. He Channelled Tom Cruise For The Role
Inspiration for a character can be found in just about every place imaginable. An actor can find it whilst studying animals in a zoo, listening to a certain piece of music on the radio, or even whilst in the middle of watching their favourite TV talk show.
That's precisely where it struck for Bale as the actor studied one of David Letterman's guests in the lead-up to his time walking around in Patrick Bateman's finely polished shoes. As director Mary Harron would later reveal, the actor was really taken with Tom Cruise's energy as he appeared on his screen. Specifically, his "very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes".
Bateman's soulless smiles throughout American Psycho soon became one of the defining aspects of Bale's characterisation - as we'll touch upon again later. Also, the actor himself even admitted that Bateman would've probably tried to model himself on a "cultural alpha male" like Cruise.
Fans of the source material will also note that Bateman actually lived in the same apartment building as Cruise, with the two blokes even bumping into each other in the book. Fancy that.