Christian Bale believes everyone has "chaos to them".
The 52-year-old actor stars alongside Jessie Buckley, 36, in Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!, in which he plays Frankenstein's monster — a creature he describes as being consumed by "sorrowful loneliness" — and Bale has confessed to relishing the role.
The award-winning star told Extra: "He can't live like this any longer. He's gonna die of loneliness and he needs somebody. He needs some sort of a companion. And so he takes that risk and he'd have been happy with a piece of bread or something that would sit with him and maybe hold his hand occasionally — and instead he gets this absolute insane…"
Jessie then quipped: "Croissant!"
Bale continued: "There you go, this buttery croissant … who's just the most lively, livewire, authentic, sharp, brilliant person that he could ever imagine and he's barely hanging on on this roller coaster ride that the two of them go on."
The American Psycho star went on to reflect on the film's broader themes of inner darkness.
He explained: "I think it's essential, isn't it? Life becomes a total farce — a performance — if all you're doing is accepting the sort of order and the performative nature of being eternally optimistic and being a 'good person,' which ultimately ends up with just being a bored person who's not living life properly, instead of accepting that everyone's got chaos to them."
Jessie added: "Even if you try to repress the monster, it comes out. If you're just living a mundane life, there's just little valves … that's where monstrosity comes from."
Meanwhile, Jessie revealed that she was actually rejected by two drama schools at the start of her career.
The acclaimed actress explained: "I think they were absolutely right to turn me down, by the way. I wasn't ready and I didn't know what I wanted to say. I was young and I needed to go live life."