He's already known as something of a hothead thanks to his infamous Terminator Salvation outburst, but now, Christian Bale admits that he only starred in the movie to spite his critics.
Arnie said "It sucks" about the fourth Terminator movie, and it seems that Bale shares similar sentiments. Bale already declared that McG's movie "didn't work", but he has now gone further into what went wrong.
Speaking to the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the 43-year-old revealed why he joined the franchise.
"There's a perverse side to me, where people were telling me that, there's no way on God's earth that I should take that role, and I was thinking the same thing," Bale remembered. "But when people started verbalizing that to me, I started to go, 'Oh really? All right, well watch this then.' So there was a little bit of that involved in the choice."
In an ironic twist of events, Bale also revealed that he didn't even want to be part of the sci-fi franchise that James Cameron had started back in 1974.
"I said no three times. I thought that the franchise... I went 'Nah, there's no story there.' I'd seen seen the first one and enjoyed that back in England, I'd been to the movies and seen the second one," said Bale.
He continued, "It was an unfortunate series of events involving the writers' strike, involving Jonah Nolan, who was able to come on, and really start to write a wonderful script, but then got called away for a prior commitment that he had. And it's a great thorn in my side, because I wish we could have reinvigorated [the franchise]. And unfortunately, during production, you could tell that wasn't happening. It's a great shame."
Given that the star is known for amazing roles like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and Bruce Wayne/Batman in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, Bale's portrayal of an older John Connor will not be remembered as one of his best.
However, with the movie remembered more for Bale's berserker rant than anything else, it is doubtful that anyone is losing too much sleep over Salvation.
With Cameron returning to the series alongside Linda Hamilton for Terminator 6, hopefully the past few movie misfires will be a case of "Hasta la vista, baby."
