Who other than Tom Cruise has inspired Christian Bale?

Even by Tom Cruise's standards, this hasn't been a particularly great week for Tom Cruise. On Wednesday his publicist was forced to address comments made by Bronson Pinochet from Perfect Strangers - who accused Cruise of making "constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments" during the filming of Risky Business. And now it's been revealed that he was also the inspiration for Christian Bale's performance in American Psycho.

The film's director, Mary Harron, told Black Book magazine that Bale initially struggled with the role of Patrick Bateman until he noticed Cruise's "intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes" during a David Letterman interview, and the rest is history.

This news won't come as too much of a surprise to anyone who's seen American Psycho, since Bateman channels Cruise's dead-eyed sincerity and creepy intensity so perfectly that it's a wonder the film didn't end with him shouting: "One day, so help me God, I'll star as a Nazi! A good Nazi with an eye-patch and a Californian accent!"

But it does raise a very good question: if Tom Cruise was Christian Bale's inspiration for Patrick Bateman, then who else has inspired the various Bale roles over the years? Let's find out:

For Christopher Nolan's stark re-imagining of the Batman myth, Christian Bale needed to find a modern hero for inspiration; a troubled vigilante with powerful enemies on both sides of the law, like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. That didn't happen in the end - Bale instead decided to run around punching people while doing a spot-on impression of gruff-voiced blue-haired 1980s Coronation Street character Phyllis Pearce. Or, if that's too oblique a reference for younger readers, then let's say that Christian Bale was inspired by all of humanity in the days prior to the invention of the throat lozenge.

John Connor (Terminator Salvation)

Christian Bale needed to become a different John Connor to the one we'd seen in previous Terminator films. He wasn't a rebellious youth or a dirty-faced pretty boy - he was a warrior. A warrior who wouldn't take any crap from anyone. Very much in the vein of, say, Bill O'Reilly or David O Russell. And it worked - when you watched Terminator Salvation, you really got a sense that Christian Bale hated robots. And lighting directors. Mainly lighting directors, actually.

Alfred Borden (The Prestige)

It seems clear that Bale's charming East End magician was a composite of several various inspirations - one part young Michael Caine, three parts Shane Ritchie, five parts Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins and 12 parts someone who appears to have never listened to a London accent once in their entire life.

Trevor Reznik (The Machinist)

Where Bale played an exhausted, dangerously-gaunt character who appeared to be confused by everything he saw. Not really sure about Bale's inspiration for this one - the entire cast of America's Next Top Model, possibly?

Source: Guardian Online