Bale reflects on years as Dark Knight

The Dark Knight rises in Irish cinemas this Friday on the wings of huge anticipation for the final film of director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, but there is one man who remains calm in the face of the media hype: Batman actor Christian Bale.

Bale slips into the bat costume of Gotham City’s crime-fighting superhero for the last time in The Dark Knight Rises, which like its predecessors has received strong early reviews.

Chosen by British director Nolan for his franchise reboot, which soared with 2005’s Batman Begins, Bale’s stone-faced portrayal of conflicted billionaire Bruce Wayne, aka Batman, was key to the movie’s success.

The follow-up, 2008’s The Dark Knight, solidified Bale’s status as a leading actor, and The Dark Knight Rises will be his swan song in the role.

“I’m really proud of having achieved what we had set out to do,” said Bale. “It was a very important moment for me. It was an important character.

“It’s the only time I’ve ever played a character three times in a row, and the movies themselves have changed my life and changed my career.”

Both movies earned praise from fans and critics alike. The first took in $372m (€302m) at box offices worldwide, and the second an eye-popping $1bn. Bale went on to numerous other parts and eventually nabbed an Oscar for his role as a drug-addict ex-boxer in The Fighter.

When shooting of The Dark Knight Rises was done, Bale told reporters, he wanted time alone to think about the past seven years.

“I just went down and sat in a room and realised this is it,” said Bale on the moment the cameras stopped rolling.

The Dark Knight Rises picks up eight years after The Dark Knight. The caped crusader has disappeared from public view and is a fugitive thought to be responsible for the death of Gotham City DA Harvey Dent. The man behind the mask, Bruce Wayne, has become a recluse and is rarely seen in public.

But both are forced out of hiding when cat burglar Selina Kyle, played by Anne Hathaway, arrives in Gotham, and a masked terrorist named Bane, played by Tom Hardy, shows up to take over the city. Batman comes out of hiding to stop them.

With many twists in a complex story, revealing more requires a spoiler alert. Suffice it to say that critics — not the easiest to please with superhero movies — are mostly happy.

The movie scored an 83% positive rating from seven early reviews on film site moviereviewintelligence.com. Time magazine’s Richard Corliss called it “a film of grand ambitions and epic achievement”.

Reprising their roles are Michael Caine as Alfred the butler, Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox. Newcomers include Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Hardy, all three of whom worked with Nolan on his 2010 Oscar winner, Inception.