There's an interesting coda to the story of Bale's father. The world traveler eventually became an airline pilot. He and Bale's mother divorced. When I ask when, Bale's eyes wander to the middle distance, and he says curtly, “That was a while back.” Then, in 2000, Bale's dad ended up marrying Gloria Steinem, when he was 59 and she was 66. He died three years later, and she has said he was the love of her life. When I ask what it was like being Gloria Steinem's stepson, Bale's discomfort becomes apparent. “You know, she's an extraordinary woman,” he tells me, “but usually family are the last people to recognize any kind of brilliance, you know what I mean? As it should be, because you're meant to just be another member of the family.” I wonder if he's talking about himself, too, but he leaves no doubt that it's the end of the subject. The message is clear: It's okay to talk about family mythology, but probably best to steer clear of the real thing. It's an honorable request, and it's time to get back to the business at hand before wankiness sets in.

Doing Empire of the Sun at such a young age must have changed your life pretty dramatically.

It was crap for a while. It was crap because, suddenly, you got the real experience of actually doing it, making the movie, traveling to these countries, working with these people...and then, suddenly, it was all about the other side of it, which is the fraudulent side of it, I've found, doing the whole press thing, and I sort of couldn't get my head around it. I couldn't quite work out why people were asking me to do things, what they expected of me. I just didn't quite get it. So, that put me off everything for quite some time.

You know, I was still only 14. When I say I wanted to kind of take a step back from my career, I didn't even consider that I had a career. I just found myself doing this thing which I liked a great deal, and suddenly people were talking about it as though it were a career. It seemed to be taking the fun out of it for me.

Did you even know what it meant to be in a Steven Spielberg movie?

No, no, I couldn't have cared less. It didn't matter. Vaguely knew him, vaguely knew movies, but movies were never something that was very important to me — remain not that important to me, really.

So, how did a kid who never spent much time in the movies end up getting tapped for a Steven Spielberg blockbuster? Bale tells me of hearing about the casting auditions on the radio, and something about that prompting his sister and others to push him to go for it, and suddenly a thought that had never occurred becomes a life. “It really came out of nowhere,” he says. “Lucky beyond belief, since I'm still doing it, and I'm here and everything, ‘cause if that never happened...” He doesn't finish the thought, and one struggles to imagine other alternatives, how a life like Bale's father's could unfold in these coarser times. “There was certainly no intention, and we weren't a family that had any connections,” he says. “It was nothing like that.”

I tell him that I understand that things can be accidental and chosen at the same time.

“Yes, yes, that's exactly what it was,” he replies, “and it wasn't until a long time after that I realized, ‘You know what? I think I will keep doing this.'"

On Empire, do you remember the process? Was it something innate? Do you remember how it happened?

I didn't really try, you know? It wasn't me thinking, “Oh, I'm an actor. I'm acting.” I just sort of did it. It was just having a laugh and not giving a crap if you made a fool of yourself, if you looked like a tit doing it, and that was fun. I've always enjoyed making a total tit out of myself and the feeling of people going, “What did he do there? Why would somebody do that to themselves?”

That was before you do get self-conscious and embarrassed and you start to think about other people's reactions to what you're doing instead of just doing it. That comes later, into the more advanced teenage years, where you get the awkward teenage feelings, and you're suddenly consumed with embarrassment permanently, and you're somebody getting a sense of yourself by comparing yourself with other people. But at that age, you don't have that, so you can do anything, and it's just a laugh and it's all hilarious. It's the perfect age to be an actor because you don't care if you're misunderstood.