What Christian Bale Regrets About Terminator: Salvation

If all had gone to plan, the fourth Terminator movie, Terminator: Salvation, would have kickstarted a fresh trilogy. Directed by McG and starring Christian Bale and Sam Worthington, things did not go to plan however. If anything, the film remained more notable for Bale’s verbal attack on director of photography Shane Hurlbut, that was recorded and released online.

Bale’s been looking back on Terminator: Salvation in a new interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, and sharing some of his regrets.

Admitting that he first said no to appearing in the film three times before accepting, Bale recalled that “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.”

But things were clearly going wrong even as filming continued. “I wish we could have reinvigorated [the franchise]. And unfortunately, during production, you could tell that wasn’t happening. It’s a great shame…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. 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.”

Watch Terminator: Salvation on Amazon

As for the infamous incident, where Bale was caught hurling profanity at a member of the crew, he described it as a “great learning lesson.”

“Do you remember that scene with Linda Hamilton where she’s really going nuts in Terminator 2? We said, we’ve got to channel that at some point in the film, and that was the scene in which we were channelling it. Great lesson for me of, no matter how much you lose yourself in a scene, you do not allow yourself to behave that way. And yeah, of course, I’ve got enormous regrets about it”.

Bale can currently be seen in Hostiles, that’s in cinemas now.