Remember how Christian Bale nailed the character of Patrick Bateman in ‘American Psycho‘? Tom Cruise played a major role in its inspiration. ‘American Psycho‘ is a horror film released in 2000. The movie is based on Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel of the same name.
Patrick, played by Bale, is a New York City Wall Street investment banker but has an alternate life as a serial killer. The movie has been a great success over the years not just on the big screens but also on meme pages and has rightly become a cult classic over time. Let’s look at how Tom Cruise inspired Christian Bale for the role.
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Tom Cruise Inspired Christian Bale
If you have seen the film, you must have noted that it constantly plays around with mistaken identity. Christian Bale revealed that took the sole inspiration from observing Tom Cruise on David Letterman’s show. ‘American Psycho‘ co-writer and director Mary Harron said that according to Bale, Tom “just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes.”
“It was definitely a process. We talked a lot, but he(Christian) was in L.A. and I was in New York. We didn’t actually meet in person a lot, just talked on the phone. Talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy,” Mary Harron revealed in an interview in 2009.
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What Was ‘American Psycho’ Movie Plot?
The movie follows Patrick Bateman, a wealthy investment banker on Wall Street in 1987’s New York City. He lives a wealthy and luxurious lifestyle. Patrick has a fiancée Evelyn Williams, who is played by Reese Witherspoon.
One day Bateman loses his temper and stabs a homeless man in an alley. Patrick despises a co-worker Paul Allen and soon kills him. From there, he starts his killing spree and he pretty much shoots the head of everyone who appears in his way.
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