Christian Bale on playing a detective in ‘The Pale Blue Eye’

Christian Bale seems to have a fascination with portraying characters haunted by their pasts as the actor steps into such a role in the Netflix thriller “The Pale Blue Eye,” written and directed by Scott Cooper.

This movie, which streams Friday, is Bale’s and Cooper’s third together; they previously worked on “Out of the Furnace” (2013) and “Hostiles” (2017). With this trio of films, Bale says they “really journeyed into the ethics of revenge … that Scott and I have been fascinated by and wanting to find answers to.”

Based on the novel by Louis Bayard, “The Pale Blue Eye” is set at West Point in 1830 and follows detective Augustus Landor (Bale) who is hired to discreetly investigate the gruesome murder of a cadet. Due to the cadets’ code of silence, he enlists one of their own to help unravel the case: a young man the world would come to know as Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling).

Bale’s performance is restrained and observant, one that the actor enjoyed layering. “We’re looking at a man who believes that all of his stories are behind him,” Bale said in a video interview. “He’s been an incredibly successful detective. He’s someone who doesn’t like to be known. He’s very intelligent, but he hides that in his mannerisms, in his way of speaking and just his bearing. He’s someone of high intelligence, but he can also be quite a thug.

“He’s accustomed in that era to his detective work sometimes leading to beating confessions out of people. But he’s certainly someone who believes himself to be entirely in control of himself and of his life. He discovers during this film that no matter how successful you become, how experienced you are, you are still at the mercy of others and it’s young Poe, who’s fiercely intelligent, who really teaches him that,” Bale said.

Cooper, who calls Bale his closest friend and collaborator, believes he was able to tap into a different aspect of the actor.

“If you look at the wonderful work that he’s done with directors on multiple occasions, David O’Russell three times, Christopher Nolan three or four times, Adam McKay, when he played Dick Cheney and a couple of others, we all get something very different from Christian.

“He’s so very generous to go to some very vulnerable places in my films, whether it be ‘Out of the Furnace,’ whether it be our western ‘Hostiles’ or whether it’s this. I’m fairly certain that we see a version of Christian Bale that you don’t see in any other movie.”

The filmmaker describes this movie as an Edgar Allan Poe origin story, “telling the story about young Edgar Allan Poe before he was formulated as the author we know, when he was most impressionable. So what I’m saying is that the two hours that take place in this film ultimately motivate him to become the writer that he became that we love.”

Melling, 33, began his research into the famed character with the idea that the writer had no sense of home or belonging. According to Cooper, Melling’s iteration of Poe is poetic, romantic, fanciful and incredibly sincere.

“He was very much trying to make his own way in the world and had a very nomadic existence,” Melling said. “So when he meets Landor, I think he offers him the things that he’s been searching for: a sense of home, a sense of belonging, a sense of feeling like he has a family. That was a very useful insight when I started working on who Poe might be.”

Bale and Melling share the screen much of the time as their characters work together on solving the case. But the Oscar winner preferred to lighten the mood off-screen, and it involved singing a song or two.

“He was so good. He was tapping into something that was hypnotizing. He just became Poe to me,” Bale said of Melling. “So he needed nothing from me at all. I would occasionally just sing silly songs and probably throw him off his game more than help him with his game. I think I was more of a nuisance.”

“The song was extremely useful,” said Melling. “Every day was a joy turning up on set and getting to work out what was gonna happen.”

Asked what he would sing to Melling, Bale, 48, mentioned “a certain wardrobe piece that reminded me of that mouse Fievel in ‘An American Tail’ and so I would sing that song ‘Somewhere Out There’ to Harry right before an important take and then walk away trying to look innocent,” he laughed.

For Lucy Boynton, who plays Lea Marquis, Poe’s potential love interest, choosing roles is about having an emotional response to characters and whether there’s something to be said.

“I think she’s a really great example of that,” Boynton said of Lea. “She was so interesting as a character to unravel and unpack … The character takes such a turn and it was a really beautiful and interesting journey to kind of piece together.”

Playing her brother Artemus, a West Point cadet, is Harry Lawtey. “I think with a character like this, who has kind of ambiguous and slightly uncertain motivations and intentions, you’ve got to get to the root and the acorn of why they do the things they do, and empathize with them and understand it, and fundamentally try and walk in their shoes really,” he said.

Lawtey called it a “dream come true” working with Bale, whom he described as “a generous, respectful collaborator, completely leading by example.” Both Boynton and Lawtey noted that the actor was always looking out for his cast and crew.

“I think there’s something really satisfying about working with people like Christian and Scott Cooper who take their work very seriously, and it gives permission to everyone else to do the same, to really go 100 per cent into it and invest everything, and try something that is so conducive to a creative work environment,” said Boynton. “It allows you just to really enjoy it and kind of explore.”

“Echoing what Lucy was saying about Christian’s consideration for everyone’s comfort and well-being … I had first-hand experience with that,” Lawtey added. In one scene, “we ended up kind of coming to blows a little bit, which just in itself was quite cool. Not everyone gets to have a fight with Batman. So after every single take, he would ask me if I was OK and not everyone does that. He clearly just wants everyone to be on the same team, as does Scott. There’s a level of encouragement and enthusiasm that the both of them bring, which just makes it so much easier for me as a vastly less experienced actor to kind of feel at home.”

With this being a whodunnit, Cooper believes Bale would make a great detective.

“He’s been making movies since he was 12 years old,” Cooper said. “So for 30 some years, he’s met every type of person. He’s been around the world. He’s been put in almost every position and he has an ability to read people in ways that others can’t, because you see that portrayal onscreen … he’s so keenly observant and that’s the mark of a great actor.”

Marriska Fernandes is a Toronto-based entertainment reporter and film critic. She is a freelance contributor for the Star’s Culture section. Follow her on Twitter: @marrs_fers

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