The Brutal Truth About Dick Cheney
How Adam McKay pulled off ‘Vice,’ a biopic about modern politics’ prince of darkness
It was a fever, and possibly divine intervention, that made Adam McKay realize he didn’t know Dick. It was 2016, and the writerdirector had just finished the awards-circuit death march for The Big Short, his look at the housing crisis. Then, a week after the Oscars, the 50-year-old filmmaker found himself laid up with “the worst flu you could imagine.”
Delirious, the director behind comedies like Anchorman and Step Brothers turned to his bookshelf for salvation. “And I looked over and went, ‘Oh, a Dick Cheney book.’” The more McKay read, the more he realized the former vice president may have been an even bigger influence on modern politics than he’d realized. “On SNL, we joked that he was Darth Vader. But I think it was even worse than we thought.”
That moment became the starting point for Vice, McKay’s singular, often irreverent and perpetually mad-as-hell biopic about the man who allegedly called all of the shots in Dubya’s White House. Starting with Cheney’s hell-raising days in Wyoming and ending with the behindthe-scenes Beltway power broker literally having his heart removed, it’s a heavily researched, highly unusual look at the former VP. And that was before McKay made one of the most WTF casting decisions of the past decade.
“I mean, why wouldn’t you think of Christian Bale as
Dick Cheney?” McKay asks, laughing. “It is a pretty big leap. But I didn’t want someone doing an impersonation, and having worked with him” — Bale played The Big Short’s hedge-fund manager Michael Burry — “I’d watched how he took apart and put a character’s psyche together. Cheney is a mystery. I knew I was gonna need a Christian Bale deep-dive here.”
Even Bale himself seemed mystified by the casting choice; after reading the script, he recalled texting McKay, “Do you not realize how bloody difficult this is going to be?” But he signed on, and the two set about conquering the main obstacle: his appearance. “The biggest hurdle was the makeup. Christian was like, ‘If the makeup sucks, the whole thing falls apart.’ We brought in makeup artist Greg Cannom [ The Curious Case of Benjamin Button], and they spent four months working on prosthetics. I thought the makeup looked amazing, but Bale’s like,
‘It can be better.’ He also put on weight [45 pounds], so by that last round of changes . . . I just remember when he walked onto the set, we were like, ‘ Holy moly!’ ”
By that point, McKay had also cast Amy Adams as Dick’s equally Machiavellian wife, Lynne Cheney; Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld; and Sam Rockwell as the 43rd president of the United States, George W. Bush. (“Rockwell had the hardest job,” the director says, “because Will Ferrell’s version is so definitive. But it’s freakishly good, what he does in the movie.”) Then, during preproduction, the 2016 election happened
— and McKay asked himself, “‘Do we still make this movie?’ And we felt like, ‘Oh, this is even more relevant now.’ I want to know how the hell we got here, and I have a feeling Bush and Cheney were a big part of that. I’ve said that Cheney was like the safecracker, the guy who had the keypad to open the gate — and now the gate’s open, and you have deer and hyenas running around the White House.”
Indeed, McKay feels that Vice’s more outrageous Anchorman- like moments — a fake-credits roll in the middle of the film, the Cheneys getting hot and heavy while speaking in Shakespearean verse, a maitre d’ describing a menu of legal loopholes and
Gitmo torture options — are completely in tune with our current moment. “It’s just horror and absurdity in the Trump era,” McKay notes. “And I just feel like this timeline sort of got swept under the rug. But people need to be reminded that there’s a history, there’s an arc. I don’t know if this movie is going to change anything. But it was definitely cathartic to make it.”
“Cheney had the keypad to open the gate — and now you have deer and hyenas running around the White House.”