'The Fighter' Star Christian Bale Fires Back Over Weight Loss Comments

Over the years, Hollywood movie star Christian Bale has starred in many different movies, and in order to play the different characters his weight has fluctuated enormously.

In his role in The Machinist, Bale lost a huge amount of weight in order to play his emaciated character in the movie.  The Fighter also saw him lose a huge amount of weight.

Bale said that people think that having to change appearance for roles is a joke when in fact it is extremely difficult.

Bale has also lost weight for roles in other movies such as Rescue Dawn but said that many journalists make light of his transformations and have no idea how painful and difficult it can be to change his appearance to the degree that he has to when playing certain characters. He then has to get back to a healthy weight to play roles such as Batman (aka Bruce Wayne) in several of the Batman movies including Batman Begins.

He said that many people were patronising about the fact that he had to lose weight, stating: "For God's sake, do people not understand what a pain it is to do? It's as though it's some comment about 'Oh, it's easy for him because he's done it a bunch of times.' It's not easy, it's not fun - it's horrible."

He said that he had to lose thirty pounds for his part in The Fighter, which also stars Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams, but said: "I would never pick to do that, but it's a part that I like and he's a welterweight and he's a crackhead. I don't know about you, but I've never seen a welterweight with any fat on him - or a crackhead. So it's just what you end up having to do."