According to Christian Bale, he typically accepts roles after Leonardo DiCaprio has already been rejected them. The two Hollywood superstars have long been seen as having an underlying rivalry by the uninitiated. A representative of the star claimed once that DiCaprio frequently won projects that Bale was up for.
Bale said in a statement to GQ, “Look, to this day, any role that anybody gets, it’s only because he’s passed on it beforehand. 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.” He further said, “So, thank you, Leo, because literally, he gets to choose everything he does. And good for him, he’s phenomenal.” Bale added that he never took DiCaprio’s status as the casting directors’ first choice for their movies personally, “No. Do you know how grateful I am to get any damn thing? I mean, I can’t do what he does.”
The most popular movie was Titanic, which increased Leonardo’s popularity and ranks among the highest-grossing films of all time. He also didn’t get parts in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, This Boy’s Life, and other films. Now the actor who plays the roles in Thor: Love and Thunder has something to say about them.
Bale then mentioned about his role as Batman saying, “They had paid me the absolute minimum they were legally allowed to pay me. I remember one time sitting in the makeup trailer and the makeup artists were laughing at me because I was getting paid less than any of them.” “They said they would only make it if they could pay me that amount,” Bale explained. “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.”