Christian Bale Once Shared That His Life as a Child Star ‘Was Crap’

Christian Bale has been acting since he was a youth, but the Batman Begins actor didn’t enjoy child stardom. Initially, there were certain things about being an actor a younger Bale couldn’t stand.

Christian Bale was surprised with how much he enjoyed acting growing up

Bale had a fairly early start in show business. Although his relatives were involved in show business, they had no connection to Hollywood. According to a 2007 interview Bale did with LA Weekly, his mother was a circus dancer and his uncle was an actor. Originally, the Oscar-winner became an actor simply due to the passion he had for it.

“It wasn’t really in my face, growing up. But seeing my mom doing that, and I think also just realizing there was a chance for not having any kind of nine-to-five job and the chance for travel and for good, weird experiences, and, um, it just kind of grabbed me more than anything else. I didn’t really have any notion of wanting to go to college or anything like that,” Bale said.

When he officially entered the business, he was caught off guard by just how much he enjoyed the art.

“Well, it was kind of a surprise to me, first of all, just how much I did enjoy it. I always hated doing any kind of school production, or anything like that, because, for me, what I liked was the complete insanity of everybody believing in what they were doing and taking it really seriously. So, I didn’t like it when you were doing a school production, where it was just a laugh for a few people,” he added.

Christian Bale once shared that his life as a child star ‘was crap’

Bale received one of his first major breaks by starring in the Steven Spielberg feature Empire of the Sun. The Hard Times star was only 13 years old when he got the part. It was a role he acquired through a combination of his own unique talents and good fortune. But it was also a career and a success he didn’t even plan for.

“It really came out of nowhere,” he said. “Lucky beyond belief, since I’m still doing it, and I’m here and everything, ’cause if that never happened …”

After having fun on the set of the Sun, he discovered there was another part of acting he didn’t enjoy. His child stardom led to the attention and interviews that typically came with an increase of an actor’s profile. And it was something that influenced his experiences as a young celebrity.

“It was crap for a while,” Bale said. “It was crap because, suddenly, you got the real experience of actually doing it, making the movie, traveling to these countries, working with these people…and then, suddenly, it was all about the other side of it, which is the fraudulent side of it, I’ve found, doing the whole press thing, and I sort of couldn’t get my head around it. I couldn’t quite work out why people were asking me to do things, what they expected of me. I just didn’t quite get it. So, that put me off everything for quite some time.”

For a while, it even made Bale want to reevaluate his path.

“You know, I was still only 14. When I say I wanted to kind of take a step back from my career, I didn’t even consider that I had a career. I just found myself doing this thing which I liked a great deal, and suddenly people were talking about it as though it were a career. It seemed to be taking the fun out of it for me,” he added.

Christian Bale didn’t want his daughter to be a child star because of his own experiences

In a 2013 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Bale once again opened up about his difficulties adjusting to being a child star. At first, he found the career both rewarding and satisfying.

“It was money, you know? ‘Christ, my family can do with that!’ So sure, all right, I did it; there was no reason not to do it. And everybody kept asking me to do it, and then it became sort of a thing of, ‘Oh, I could actually really provide with this,’ and there’s a pride in being able to do that,” he confided.

But the downside to all that attention at a young age was, to Bale, it eventually felt like a prison. One that threatened his passion for acting, and something he wouldn’t want to subject his own children to.

“I certainly wouldn’t have my daughter do anything like that because it becomes a necessity and, in that case, it killed it — it actually killed my drive of acting because it became something I felt like I had to do. You know, you can’t enjoy something when you’re actually — not being forced to do it, but you feel that duty and obligation that if you don’t a lot of people are going to suffer,” he said.