Christian Bale Reveals Roles He Landed That Leonardo DiCaprio Turned Down First

Christian Bale has Leonardo DiCaprio to thank for his success, the actor said in a new interview. Bale said he almost did not get to star in American Psycho, which helped establish the former child actor as a leading man because DiCaprio had the part of Patrick Bateman first. Almost everyone Bale has worked with offered his role to DiCaprio first, and if the Titanic star took those parts, Bale might not be the A-lister he is today.

“Look, to this day, any role that anybody gets, it’s only because he’s passed on it beforehand,” Bale told GQ of DiCaprio. “It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you. It doesn’t matter how friendly you are with the directors. All those people that I’ve worked with multiple times, they all offered every one of those roles to him first.” One of the movies Bale reportedly lost to DiCaprio was Titanic.

One of the people Bale worked with even admitted to him that DiCaprio was their top pick for a role he landed. “So, thank you, Leo, because literally, he gets to choose everything he does. And good for him, he’s phenomenal,” Bale added.

The actor, who is back in theaters this weekend with Amsterdam, said he does not take it personally. “Do you know how grateful I am to get any damn thing? I mean, I can’t do what he does,” Bale explained of DiCaprio. “I wouldn’t want the exposure that he has either. And he does it magnificently. But I would suspect that almost everybody of similar age to him in Hollywood owes their careers to him passing on whatever project it is.”

Bale started his career as a child actor, scoring his breakout role in Steven Spielberg’s underrated 1987 film Empire of the Sun. In 1992, he scored another hit with Disney’s Newsies. However, it was not until he played the materialistic investment banker Patrick Bateman in Mary Herron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho that Hollywood became convinced he could be a major star. That nearly did not happen, because Lionsgate wanted DiCaprio to star and Oliver Stone to direct. When they left, Herron returned and she got her wish to cast Bale.

“Nobody wanted me to do it except the director,” Bale told GQ. “So they said they would only make it if they could pay me that amount. I was prepping for it when other people were playing the part. I was still prepping for it. And, you know, it moved on. I lost my mind. But I won it back.”

In 2005, Bale starred as Batman in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and he reprised the role in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. Since then, Bale has more than proven he can be more than just Batman. In 2011, he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for David O. Russell’s The Fighter. He reunited with Russell on American Hustle and his latest movie, Amsterdam, which opens on Friday. Bale also reunited with his Hostiles director Scott Cooper for Netflix’s upcoming The Pale Blue Eye.