Christian Bale explains how he came up with his Batman voice

The bigger a film gets, the riper it becomes for parody. The Dark Knight trilogy is no exception to that rule, with most efforts focusing on the fact that Christian Bale must have gargled with hot tar and Vin Diesel in order to achive his growly Batman voice. So how did Bale come up with the voice for the caped crusader?

By feeling like an absolute goofball in the batsuit, that’s how.

Speaking to MTV, Bale explained that when he originally donned the batsuit worn by Val Kilmer in Batman Forever, he felt less than comfortable in his audition:

I got there. They put me in Val Kilmer’s suit. It didn’t even fit properly, and I stood in it and I went ‘I feel like an idiot.’ What kind of guy walks around, dressed like a bat? And is then going to go ‘Hello, how are you? Just ignore that I’m dressed as a bat.’ Of course, he’s meant to be doing this,” Bale said. “If you look at the history of the guy and the pain that he went through. I went ‘I can’t do this in a normal voice. I have to become a beast in order to sell this to myself. I went home that evening, and my wife said, ‘How’d it go?’ I went, ‘I kind of did this.’ And I showed her, and she went, ‘Oh, you f—ed that one up, didn’t you?’ Thank God they went for it.

As for the man replacing him, Ben Affleck, Bale reckons that the actor will come up with a compeltely different take on the bat-voice:

[The voice] ain’t for everybody. Ben’s obviously going to have to do his own thing, but it was the only way that I could find how to get into that and to justify wearing the fricking Batsuit. Otherwise, he’s just loopy beyond belief. He’s loopy, but he’s loopy with a method to his madness.

As long as Affleck pulls out a similar voice to the one he used in Jay and Silent Bob Strike back, I think we could have a character that doesn’t need to smoke a pack of Marloboros every day before fighting crime when he hits the screens in 2015 for Batman vs Superman.

Last Updated: November 19, 2013