A short defense of Christian Bale

I don't particularly like Christian Bale, and I think he's just about the least charismatic movie star on the planet.

That being said: Respected, highly popular actors like Christian Bale don't take their jobs lightly, whether the job is Shakespeare or some silly "killer robots" movie. The job looks easy to a lot of people -- stand in front of a camera, say a few lines, pretend to cry. But like any job, there's so much more to it than meets the eye.

Bale is now the central figure of two gigantic movie franchises at the same studio. A great deal of Warner Bros.' financial future depends on him. He is the only "name" attached to May's "Terminator: Salvation," and the next Batman movie will rest squarely on his shoulders now that Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart are out of the picture (albeit for two totally different reasons).

So there's a lot of pressure on him, and at the time of his blow-up on the set of "T4," he was under public scrutiny for an ugly incident involving his mother and sister. And let's not forget that he had just run a publicity gauntlet where all the questions were about his dead friend and colleague.

It's easy to bash a famous millionaire for exhibiting petulant behavior. But I'm pretty sure Bale works very hard at his craft, and he simply couldn't take it when one of his key collaborators wasn't up to his level.