Image credit: Georges Biard
When Christian Bale, an actor who is always dead serious about preparing for his roles, prepped to star as the lead in American Psycho, he used the personality of Tom Cruise as inspiration.
Director Mary Harron said in an interview that during the pre-production phase, the actor had watched an episode of Late Night with David Letterman in which Tom Cruise was featured. Bale noticed something in Cruise's manner that he thought would work for his character of preppy psychopath Patrick Bateman.
“It was definitely a process. [Bale and I] 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.”
Once one knows that, it's almost impossible not to see Cruise in some of Bateman's cheesy yet manic grins and exceptionally animated quips.
Read other facts about American Psycho in this article. Meanwhile, I've got a res at Dorsia.
That's how I've always seen Tom Cruise... Without a doubt the stiffest and least convincing actor out there, unable to express ANY believable emotions on-screen. No idea why he still has a career.