The Big Short Interview: Christian Bale On Playing Michael Burry
Screenrant
In The Big Short, director Adam McKay’s takedown of how the 2008 economic crash occurred, Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, the real-life money manager who created the financial “instrument” – known as a credit default swap – that allowed investors to bet against what Burry realized was an unstable housing market. While this allowed Burry and others to make obscene amounts of money in the short term, it also helped to destablize an already shaky market and ultimately send the global economy into a tailspin from which it barely pulled out, with catastrophic effects.
Burry, a genuine eccentric who played drums to brutal heavy metal music to unwind when not staring for hours at numbers on computer screens, is both a villain and something like a moral center in The Big Short: by the time he sees the horrifying consequences of what he’s created, he’s genuinely dismayed but unable to stop it. And Bale – who met with the reclusive Burry – is the perfect actor to play this conflicted figure. Screen Rant spoke with him about it recently in Los Angeles.
