Actor Christian Bale, who played the lead in the 2000 American Psycho movie, was recently asked what he thought of the new American Psycho movie coming from Luca Guadagnino. “Whoever wants to give it a shot, give it a pop,” Bale told The Hollywood Reporter at the premiere of his latest film The Bride in New York City. “I loved making it with Mary Harron so many years back. So many fantastic memories of it all. Bold choice of anyone to… I don’t know if they’re doing a remake or what… I don’t know anything about it, but all the best to ’em. I like brave people.”
Bale didn’t have any particular picks when asked as far as actors to play the iconic Patrick Bateman this time around, but it’s great to see him so open to another portrayal that might end up quite different from his own.
That said, casting has seemingly been a big undertaking for the project. When it was first announced in 2024, Austin Butler was set to star as Bateman — but a 2025 report claimed that The White Lotus star Patrick Schwarzenegger was up for the role. But, as of this writing, no one has officially been attached to the part just yet. It doesn’t seem to be for a lack of trying, though.
“A couple of high-profile actors, whom I can’t name, have turned it down,” Bret Easton Ellis, author of the 1991 novel on which the film was based, revealed last month on his podcast. “I think maybe because they don’t want to be in the shoes of Christian Bale.” To be fair, that makes a lot of sense. Bale’s performance is the stuff of legend, and it will probably prove a bit difficult to find an actor ready and willing to do something wholly different with their Bateman — which appears to be Guadagnino’s strategy here.
“From what I’m told, this movie is completely different from Mary Harron’s 2000 movie,” Ellis also shared on the pod. “It’s a completely different take, and going to bear no resemblance to that movie.”
It’s certainly the move, doing something completely different with the source material versus rehashing the same old thing. Plus, the book and the movie do have a lot of differences between them, so there’s tons of opportunity there to play around. The only other person officially attached to the project besides Guadagnino is The Bourne Ultimatum writer Scott Z. Burns, who also wrote Steven Soderbergh’s 2013 film Side Effects, and it’ll be interesting to see where he goes with this reimagining of a perverted classic.
Before it became a movie that launched Christian Bale into stardom, American Psycho was a critically acclaimed, darkly comedic novel about the poisonous power of the American Dream. And in January, IGN exclusively debuted a new preview of The Folio Society’s American Psycho set, featuring new looks at the box design, endpapers, frontispiece, and replica business card.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
