Christian Bale is one of those actors who is known for being able to physically transform himself for a role. Bale’s often been willing, and more surprisingly able, to gain or lose significant amounts of weight to play different roles. His newest part, as the villain Gorr the God-Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder, is another place where the actor is looking awfully thin, but it turns out the thing that he really had trouble with during production was the fingernails.
Gorr does most of his damage in Thor: Love and Thunder was a massive sword but he very likely could have seriously hurt somebody with his fingernails as well, as Christian Bale had to wear significant extensions on his fingers. Bale told Deadline at the Thor: Love and Thunder premiere that the nails made it difficult to do things but they made things so difficult they made him feel like he could do even less. Bale explained…
It rendered me completely incapable of everything. I was pathetic. I found myself thinking things like, ‘I don’t think I can walk because I’ve got long nails.’ It affected my brain. I was like, ‘I can’t eat, I’ve got long nails.’ I was trying to type. I couldn’t do anything.
Christian Bale had previously talked about how much fun he had making Love and Thunder but it sounds like it wasn’t all fun and games. One could see how the long nails might have actually made things like eating difficult, but Bale says that he felt like the nails made him incapable of doing anything. It’s wild to think that something as simple as nail extensions could have had such an impact on Bale mentally, but here we are.
By comparison, the weight loss that Bale went through was comparatively easy for the actor. Not only had Bale done it before, he’d actually done it for the movie he had finished making just before jumping into Thor: Love and Thunder. In fact, it was because Bale was already very skinny, and had no time to change that prior to filming, that it was decided his version of Gorr would be the physical opposite of Thor. A lot of fans had concerns about Gorr’s look early on, but hearing Bale explain it, the decisions certainly make sense. As Bale told ET…
I went from one film straight to Thor. I usually like to have a lot more time in between, but it was literally like three days between that and going into quarantine down in Australia. I was already quite skinny for the film that I’d made before. So we looked at the comic book character that was very muscular, and I said, ‘well, it just can’t happen, so we have to look at his supernatural powers instead.’ And also, how can you compete with Chris in terms of muscles? No matter how much I would have worked out it would have looked pitiful by comparison.
Whatever the reasons, it’s safe to say that the choices made for Gorr the God-Butcher certainly worked out. Christian Bale’s performance is being singled out by many fans and critics alike as one of the highlights of Thor: Love and Thunder.
