When Christian Bale arrived on the Thor: Love and Thunder set just a couple of weeks after wrapping production on Amsterdam (in theaters October 7), he immediately noticed a problem with his villainous Marvel character, Gorr the God Butcher.
“The comics have him kind of as giant, almost as big as Thor,” Bale tells Inverse. “Well, Chris [Hemsworth] is a real giant with those muscles and everything.” Christian Bale? Not so much.
Thankfully, Bale also had a solution that didn’t involve wearing a CGI suit: Make him as different from Thor as possible. The result was the incredibly creepy version of Gorr the God Butcher we got in Thor: Love and Thunder.
“I said to Taika Waititi, the director: Mate, we got to have a whole different take. It’s got to be shadow monsters and dark matter powers. Have him be skinny and waiflike and apparently no match for Thor,” Bale recalls.
“But that’s the point. He doesn’t need physical strength. He has supernatural strength.”
Of course, not everything Bale suggested made it into Thor: Love and Thunder — or even the Blu-ray extras. Waititi previously revealed that the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) was meant to have a role in the movie until it was cut. And while Marvel has released a few deleted scenes from the film, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see Goldblum’s planned appearance. But that’s not the only deleted scene we’re being deprived of.
Speaking to Inverse, Bale reveals that while improvising on set, he pushed the limits of Marvel’s family-friendly reputation to the point that even Chris Hemsworth seemed worried. Of course, none of these “R-rated” scenes will ever see the light of day, but it’s fun to imagine what might have been. Here’s the full quote:
“With Thor: Love and Thunder, Taika and me, we kind of knew that some of the stuff we were doing probably wouldn't end up in the film, but we wanted to just push it and see. Ultimately, it is and should be a film that all the family can go and enjoy. And Chris Hemsworth, a couple of times he looked at me it was like, Dude, that's a little too far. I don't think anyone's gonna want to see that unless it's an R-rated film. but it was a great joy to give it a shot. And we had a lot of fun in there doing certain scenes and takes on certain scene choices, even if they didn't end up in the final cut.”
Speaking of comic book movies, we couldn’t let an interview with Christian Bale go by without asking about his most iconic superhero role: Batman. With Michael Keaton back in the cape and cowl, and multiverse movies trendier than ever, would Bale consider a return for a Bat-verse movie full of Bruce Wayne variants?
The answer, sadly, is no — with one big exception. As Bale has put it before, the only way he’d play Batman again is if his old director asked him to.
“The thing for me is that Chris Nolan and I always said, If we’re lucky enough to do three, we’ll do three and leave it at that,” Bale tells Inverse. “We were lucky enough to do three and stay true to our word. That’s loyalty. You’ve got to stick to a deal. If Chris came to me and said, ‘I’ve got a new story,’ I’d be interested. But other than that, I don’t think so.”
