Bale is living proof that you can take the boy out of the old country, but you can't take the old country out of the boy. He still speaks with a distinct brogue, and his conversational manner is that of a guy sitting at a pub having a few pints next to a stranger — friendly but not overly familiar. He doesn't really look you in the eye, but he's game so long as it doesn't get wanky.
Does this feel like home now, or do you still have an emotional tie to British culture?
Well, talking about football or something...If I see England play, I can't help but get goose bumps, you know? There will always be that. But that's what half of America is anyway — people who come from somewhere else. This is definitely my home now. I've ended up being here for almost half my life.
Your uncle was an actor, and your mom was in show biz; was that what brought you into the business?
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.
Were you conscious of all that as a kid? I'm asking because you started acting at a very young age and you're expressing fairly mature ideas about why you wanted to do it.
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.
I was serious about it, and I realized how much I enjoyed this going off and becoming someone else for a while and really obsessing about it. I didn't see a chance for that in much else that I was looking at, and I'd kind of stumbled into this in a very lucky fashion and thought it was something I didn't want to lose a grip on. That was very early on. It was unbelievable that I got a job [Empire of the Sun] out of nowhere that had me going to Shanghai and Spain...See, growing up with me dad, he had all these great stories from when he was a kid, because he ran away at 13 and he ended up living in Egypt. He ended up living in the Caribbean for a while. He just didn't give a crap. He'd jump on [a ship] and get a job with somebody, and he'd jump off at some other port somewhere, see what happened, you know? Nobody looking after him, doing it on his own, and it sounded fantastic.
How come I was sitting in some fucking dingy little town in fucking England, just sitting under a freeway, smoking out and, you know, getting drunk with friends? And, hey, that's all good, but it's not quite the thing that I knew he was doing as a kid.
So, he told you all these epic tales of adventure?
Well, yeah, he wasn't actually very overblown about it. You had to drag it out of him...It was just that sense of there being a lot more out there and you don't have to get a bunch of money for it, so long as you're prepared to end up sleeping on benches sometimes, or get taken in by people and stuff. That's what I kind of fantasized about, thinking, That's the life, that's what I want to do.
Do you know what your dad ran away from?
Um, boredom, basically. There were adventures out there. There were crazy places to visit; there were crazy people out there you should meet.
He sounds like an English beatnik.
Yeah, that's it. That's exactly what he was. Also, he was a tough bastard as well. I saw him in situations...it was hilarious.
You mean in bar fights?
Well, I never saw that. Just, when he wanted to be, he could be a very intimidating figure. He was a lot bigger than me.
Was that onerous in a way, or did you feel close to him?
Oh, no. Really close.
