Here comes trouble

CHRISTIAN BALE'S not an entourage guy. When a makeup artist raises the first cotton ball with its load of flesh tone to prep him for a later, taped interview, he begs off, capitalizing on a counter offer he'd gotten to grab a couple of pints in the bar. "A couple beers," he says, downsizing the stylist as graciously as possible, "will bring out my natural Celtic flush."

Although Hollywood is probably just as full of nice guys as the other, more legendary kind, there's still something comforting about discovering that someone who's been so relentlessly mutable on-screen is so casually mannerly and self-effacing off it. When a business-suited hotel employee brusquely sends Bale away from a sheltered back garden, he heads to the front one (the forward-thrust shoulders and long, bowed legs giving the impression of a gray wolf on the trot) and slouches onto a banquette with a seemingly unforced eagerness to talk.

He's got plenty to talk about. With "The Prestige's" strong opening weekend last month helping to confirm his bankability -- certainly when he's in tandem with director Chris Nolan, who, in shooting the dark-toned prequel film "Batman Begins," played to Bale's great strength of portraying an inwardness that's curiously accessible -- he's a bona fide movie star and what one British paper called a "cyber pin-up," a cult god in geekdom.

But perhaps more interestingly, he's knocked off a row of indie projects that serve to remind us that he's always made the adventurous choices -- notably 2000's "American Psycho," in which he was a buff paragon of feral attractiveness, and 2004's "The Machinist," for which he shed 60-odd pounds and caused Jennifer Jason Leigh's hooker character to say, "If you were any thinner, you wouldn't exist."

Bale is largely alone among his contemporaries when it comes to his acting template -- though Daniel Day-Lewis, with his dedication bordering on mania and his eager clutching at darker roles, may give him a peer group of two. Even as a child, Bale's almost intimidatingly sober mien (in contrast to Leonardo DiCaprio's talented petulance, or Orlando Bloom's transparency) seemed to mark him as an adult who just wasn't ready to shave.

His tidier performances -- a somewhat humdrum med student in "Laurel Canyon," a sightly befuddled journalist among libertines in "Velvet Goldmine," a career soldier who must face the loss of the woman he loves beyond reason in "The New World" -- have a darkness too, with the characters becoming a kind of sounding board for the filmmakers' portrayal of the world as a corrupt, emotionally dangerous place.