Bale sees ‘Promise’ in film’s spotlight on genocide
Unlike most actors, Christian Bale takes an unusual approach to interviews: humor.
The Oscar-winning actor stars in Friday’s “The Promise” as an endangered American journalist in wartorn 1916 Turkey.
During a phone interview last week from Los Angeles, Bale, 43, repeatedly made disparaging — and often funny — remarks, mocking his status and his box-office appeal.
On how he chooses a role, “Well, often I’m looking for something that’s going to just definitively end my career and then I don’t have to keep doing this anymore,” he said in his distinctive Welsh-accented English.
“Sometimes you find that those choices actually end up being people’s favorites” — exactly the case with both Batman and “American Psycho.”
“For me, there’s just a mood. There’s needs,” he continued. “But primarily, which one just sticks in your head. Sometime after reading, you just find that it keeps on cropping up.”
“The Promise” details a brutal genocide. As WWI raged in Europe, Muslim Turks, allied with Germany, murdered 5 million minority Christian Armenians.
“I had been following the atrocities of the Yazides being slaughtered on the mountain, if you recall that. Well, it’s still going on, with the terrible treatment of those people.
“They were being slaughtered on a mountaintop, and then I was sent this script — and there were Armenians being slaughtered on a mountaintop on Musa Dagh. It was almost exactly 100 years to the day and the same thing was taking place on the news! So it just seemed very topical.
“Also, you probably paid attention in school but I didn’t, and I was completely oblivious to the Armenian genocide. I was stunned that I didn’t know anything about this at all.
“The fact that the lack of consequences for the genocide quite possibly have led to many of the consequent genocides that have happened, that just really got me fascinated.
“Then to add to that, the declaration by Survival Pictures that they wanted 100 percent of the proceeds to go towards charities involved in identifying and holding people accountable for genocide nowadays — I’ve never heard of such a thing. This is 100 percent.
“So the altruism that they had mixed with my education about this made this project keep cropping up in my mind.”
About that he wasn’t joking. (‘The Promise” opens Friday.)