Christian Bale Confirms What We Suspected About Amy Adams' On-Set Treatment

Christian Bale and Amy Adams' illustrious Hollywood careers have brought them together three times: They played an ex-boxer and a feisty bartender in "The Fighter," a pair of '70s con-artists in "American Hustle," and real-life American couple Dick and Lynne Cheney in "Vice."

Unsurprisingly, Adams enjoys acting alongside Bale. "I'm completely in love with him," she gushed to Vanity Fair. Adams also does her best to ensure that her costars find her just as wonderful to work with, which isn't always easy. "I think my true nature is to be calm but sometimes I do get caught in a vortex," she told So It Goes of her on-set behavior. "Once or twice I've let stress get the better of me but I'm not a tantrum thrower or anything like that."

As noted by The Telegraph, Adams has a rep for being modest and pleasant, not unlike the Disney princess she plays in "Enchanted." She told the outlet, "I was raised to treat people well. Everybody." But director David O. Russell, whom Adams and Bale both worked with on "The Fighter" and "American Hustle," saw something different in her. "He met me and he said: 'Oh you are so not a princess type — we'll have to do something about that!'" Adams recalled to The Guardian. However, in trying to get Adams to add a little edge to her charm, Bale confirmed that Russell played the role of a villain.

In one of the leaked emails from the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, filmmaker Jonathan Alter related some of the unsavory stories he's heard about David O. Russell's behavior on the "American Hustle" set. "[Russell] so abused Amy Adams that Christian Bale got in his face and told him to stop acting like an a**hole," Alter wrote, according to the Daily News. Adams later confirmed her experience working Russell was not a pleasant one. "I was really just devastated on set. I mean, not every day, but most," she told British GQ in 2016. She later told The Guardian that it got to the point where she considered quitting acting because she didn't want to expose her daughter to the emotional state she was in.

Bale continued to work with Russell, signing on to star in the director's latest movie, "Amsterdam," despite admitting that he witnessed Russell's treatment of Adams. In an interview with GQ, Bale described himself as a "mediator" between the director and his co-star. "When you're working with people of the crazy creative talent of Amy or of David, there are gonna be upsets," he said. Bale also revealed that he has no regrets about how he handled the situation.

But, in 2005, another former Batman actor, George Clooney, told Entertainment Weekly he'll never work with Russell again after witnessing his alleged ill treatment of an extra — an instance which ultimately found Clooney and Russell in a physical altercation over the matter.