Despite the fact that Tom Cruise hasn’t jumped on a single couch or donned a Nazi eye patch all year long, it seems that people still can’t resist the urge to take potshots at the world’s smiliest movie star. For reasons that we haven’t quite been able to figure out, two wholly unrelated people have decided that this week would be a good time to unearth revelations about Mr. Katie Holmes. Yesterday, Bronson “Balki†Pinchot made headlines when he put Cruise on blast for allegedly making wildly homophobic statements on the set of Risky Business way back in 1983. And now, American Psycho director Mary Harron is going on record with the revelation that Christian Bale based his performance as Patrick Bateman in the film on Cruise.
In an interview with BlackBook, the acclaimed director spoke about the work that she and the foul-mouthed Bale did in bringing Bret Easton Ellis’s most famous antihero to life onscreen:
It was definitely a process. We talked a lot, but he was in L.A. and I was in New York. We didn’t actually meet in person a lot, just talked on the phone. We 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.
Well, we have to admit, that’s certainly an inspired choice, especially because it pre-dated Cruise’s romp on Oprah’s couch by a full five years. And, selfishly, we can only hope that Bale comes across a script sometime soon that will allow the avid Letterman watcher to emulate Joaquin Phoenix’s catatonic appearance onscreen.
Christian Bale’s Inspiration for ‘American Psycho’: Tom Cruise [BlackBook via Oh No They Didn’t]