'You are trashing my scene!': the story behind Christian Bale's furious Terminator outburst

The voice is a category five hurricane of mid-Atlantic syllables – the Hollywood Hills with a sprinkling of Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire. And it is very, very angry. In four minutes 36 f-bombs are detonated.

“If you do it one more time I ain’t walking on this set if you’re still hired!” vented Christian Bale in a meltdown heard – and then parodied and remixed – around the world. “Do you want me to go and trash your lights? Do you want me to go and trash them? Then why are you trashing my scene?”

It was the midpoint of another exhausting day at Kirkland Airforce Base in New Mexico, where the once and future Batman was filming Terminator Salvation. The 32 year-old former child actor had been cast as the saga’s messiah figure, John Connor. However, at that moment it was director of photography Shane Hurlbut who was being crucified. He’d walked into Bale’s sightline during a fraught scene with the star’s onscreen wife, Bryce Dallas Howard. Things went downhill from there.

“I’m going to ------- kick your ------- ass if you don't shut up for a second,” thundered Bale. He was transforming in real time from a mildly intense a-lister into a fully operational expletive-bot. Nobody knew what to say – least of all director McG, who meekly asked that everybody “take a minute”.

The Terminator franchise’s fourth instalment would go on to be a relative flop and critical punching bag. It may well have disappointed anyway – but the leaking of Bale’s tantrum four months before the May 2009 release potentially sealed its fate, instantly labeling it as a "troubled production". Whatever the reason, Salvation’s perceived failure – it made $371 million on a $200 million budget – killed in its tracks plans for a second Terminator trilogy set after Skynet’s machine uprising.

But you can’t keep a time travelling robot down. A decade on, James Cameron, director of the 1984 original, has reunited with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton for another do-over. The good news is Terminator: Dark Fate isn’t awful. The downside is that it is unlikely to cough up a sideshow as amusing as Christian throwing his director of photography to the lions.

Bale’s volcano moment had arrived the previous July halfway through the shoot in New Mexico. It was a trying period for the actor. He was coming off Christopher Nolan’s brooding The Dark Knight and the death of its co-star, Heath Ledger. Meanwhile his relationship with his family back in England was said to be strained. Bale was reportedly unhappy at his mother and sister’s standoffish attitude towards his wife, Sibi.

To this could be added a jot of ghoulish absurdity. Weeks previously the victim of a gang hit was discovered buried in the garden of the actor’s rented house. It was the perfect recipe for a Bale-pocalypse.

His rant, when leaked, was received as a gift by a grateful world. On February 2 2009, hours after the initial leak electronic composer Lucian Piane released a dance remix entitled Bale Out. He filtered in samples of Barbra Streisand rowing with George W Bush, so that it sounds as if Bale and Streisand are going at it. Within three days the song had been listened to over a million times on YouTube. McG put it on his iPod.

We don’t know what Bale thought of the parody. Going by previous form he is unlikely to have slapped his thighs and laughed. Just how much pressure the star was under during the making of Terminator had became frighteningly clear days after the original rant, when he left New Mexico for the London premiere of the Dark Knight.

Hours before he was due on the red-carpet he had a heated altercation with mother Jenny and sister Sharon at the Dorchester hotel. He is said to have confronted them over Sibi.

Tempers frayed and things got out of hand. His mother and sister never made it to Batman. But they did report Bale to the police for assault. On July 22 he was arrested and held for four hours. No charges were pressed, though the family did not immediately reconcile.

“Christian's attitude is that this was his mother's fault because she became very provocative in an argument they were having,” a source close to the actor was later quoted as saying. “Christian was stressed, but he didn’t lay a finger on anyone. Instead, he flew off the handle and cussed his mother. He just got very loud because his mother was saying some very outrageous things about him, and his wife.”

Bale’s Terminator rant did not become news for another seven months, when it was leaked to gossip website TMZ. He had clearly irked someone on set because, although filming had stopped, the audio tape was kept rolling as he laid into the unfortunate Hurlbut. And then it somehow found its way into the public domain.

He apologised immediately, though grumpily. Yet the damage was already done. Terminator Salvation arrived fatally compromised that May. It didn’t help that fellow cast and crew – including Bryce Dallas Howard and rapper Common – decried the leaking of Bale’s tantrum rather than the tantrum itself.

“I was trying to show a little of that in the blood craziness. It went very wrong. . . ,” Bale said, having rang a LA radio station KROQ after presenters had played the rant clip all day. “I made it ugly. That was awful of me. I took it way too far. I mixed up fact and fiction. I’m half John Connor there. I’m half Christian there.”

“I was out of order beyond belief,” he told DJs Kevin Ryder and Gene “Bean” Baxter. “I acted like a punk. There is nobody who heard the tape who is hit harder than me. I make no excuses for it. It is inexcusable.”

He added that his threat to have Hurlbut sacked was “hot air”. “I heard a lot of people say I think I’m better than anybody else. Nothing could be further than the truth.”

“Christian is a method actor and was completely immersed in the moment,” Terminator Salvation assistant director Bruce Franklin later told The Wrap. He said that the actor had been under huge pressure coming off the Dark Knight. "If you are working in a very intense scene and someone takes you out of your groove…It was the most emotional scene in the movie. And for him to get stopped in the middle of it — he is very intensely involved in his character. He didn’t walk around like that all day long. It was just a moment and it passed."

The party line that soon emerged was that flipping out was part of the sacred creative process – and should have been kept that way.

“It’s terrible for us all that that tape was released,” said Howard. “When you’re working on a set, it’s a creative experience. You need a certain amount of protection and safeness. When you’re doing a really intense scene and the weather is crazy and you haven’t slept in 48 hours… people are raw.”

Others blamed Hurlbut for visually obstructing the star. "It was justified. It was warranted,” said one crew member. “For him to be broken out of that scene at that moment was really really frustrating. In a way it’s disrespectful.”

But perhaps Salvation was beyond redemption anyway. It really was a tin-can blockbuster. Director McG, an MTV wunderkind who’d first come to attention as director of the promo for the Offspring’s Pretty Fly for a White Guy, brought lashings of whiz-bang bro-energy. Alas, he seemed only vaguely attuned to the apocalyptic tension of the original Cameron films.

Indeed if anyone suffered long-term from the project’s perceived failure it was the director rather than the star. Joseph McGinty Nichol – nicknamed “McG” by his mother to avoid confusion with two other Joes in the family – had arrived in New Mexico an up-and-coming hot-shot.

But since then his bankability has diminished markedly. His most recent feature, Rim of the World, was a straight-to-Netflix movie that has arrived and departed without anyone noticing. Hurlbut, the rogue DP, has kept working too – on the TV series Into the Badlands and with McG on Rim of the World.

It would be not quite true to say that nobody had seen the crash and burn coming. Even before tensions on set, Bale had an intimation that McG wasn’t right for Terminator. When first offered the John Connor part, he’d called the director to tell him he did not think McG was a good fit for the project. And he advised that he re-write the script from scratch. 

“You can either choose to say it straight upfront, or you can have real issues and have wasted a lot of people's time by saying it after you've started?” Bale would explain. “Because at some point it's going to come out. Right? And why bother pretending that it's all there when it's not? The harshest critics are going to be the audience who have no investment in it. Who could sit down and go, “F___ off, terrible.'”

He’d actually turned down the part on three occasions, feeling that the Terminator story had run its course. The involvement of Jonah Nolan – Christopher’s Nolan’s brother and co-writer - had led him to change his mind. Unfortunately Nolan then left the production.

“I said ‘no’ three times. I thought that the franchise...I went, “Nah, there's no story there”,” Bale told the Happy Sad Confused podcast in 2018. “I’d seen the first one and enjoyed that back in England, I'd been to the movies and seen the second one.

“It was an unfortunate series of events involving the Writers Strike, involving Jonah Nolan, who was able to come on and really start to write a wonderful script and then got called away for a prior commitment that he had...It's a great thorn in my side, because I wish we could have reinvigorated that, and unfortunately during production you could tell that wasn't happening. It's a great shame.”

McG for his part insisted that Bale had never gone out of control on set. “I had it in control completely,” he would say of the notorious freakout. “I was between Shane and Christian, making it safe. Trying to out-yell them would only prove inflammatory.”

“We felt safe and controlled,” he continued. “In very short order, people were hugging and we had moved on. Shane finished the picture…I’m not trying to spin it. I can happily report that Christian doesn’t feel good about this. He’s given thought to the adjustments he wants to give to his life. Christian is a good man. He’s not a fundamentally mean guy. To [Hurlbut], he has made amends and apologised clearly and plainly. In that respect, that has been handled.”

Hurlbut’s crime had been to “fiddle” with lighting mid scene. That is unusual in the industry, where lighting is typically arranged before the actors arrive. His constantly mucking about in the background had literally driven Bale to distraction.

“He’s a fairly young DP and likes to fiddle with his lights on set during action, which is a big ‘no no’ on most productions. But apparently Shane is a pretty unrepentant light tweaker,” the website Ain’t It Cool news reported, adding that the sequence between Bale and Howard  was intended to establish the “emotional centre piece” of their relationship. “The scene in question was a very emotional and tough scene…A scene that required… a deep level of immersive concentration.”

Yet Bale paid a price too. He was rumoured to be in line for an Oscar nomination for his other big 2009 movie, Public Enemies, in which he faced off opposite Johnny Depp. The nod never manifested. The talk was that the Academy struck his name off because of his nuclear moment in New Mexico

Not that this detained Bale. Twelve months later, all was apparently forgiven when he sparkled darkly in David O’Russell’s The Fighter, for which he would win a best supporting actor Oscar - the crowning achievement in a career that had started when he was cast as the 13-year-old lead in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

Still, if he does look back on Terminator Salvation Bale can at least console himself that he isn’t the only actor to come unstuck portraying John Connor. The Connor “curse” has struck on multiple occasions.

Edward Furlong achieved fame as a juvenile delinquent version of mankind’s future saviour in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. He also suffered perhaps the most public downfall off all the actors to take on the part. An unstable home life and overnight fame proved a combustive combination. He went into rehab in 2000 and later admitted to losing his 20s to cocaine and heroin. In 2013 Furlong was arrested and charged with a misdemeanour against his girlfriend. He later served 61 days in jail for violating a barring order.

Nick Stahl, who played Connor as a cheeky upstart in 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, has also had run-ins with the law. In 2013, he was arrested for possession of methamphetamines. He’s been in and out of rehab. Once he was arrested for trying to stiff a taxi driver on a $84 fare.

Spare a moment, too, for Thomas Dekker, cast as John Connor opposite Lena Headey in the short-lived Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In October 2009, months after the Sarah Connor Chronicles went off the air, he was sentenced to two years probation and ordered to attend an alcohol awareness class following a collision with a cyclist on a motorway ramp. Jason Clarke, who brought us an evil version of Connor in 2015’s Terminator Genisys, may well be sitting at home wondering when they sky is going to fall in.

Bale, for his part, has moved on from his matinee idol phase. His most recent role was as the unglamorous Dick Cheney in Vice. It is true that he’s back looking dashing in the forthcoming Le Mans ’66, in which he plays Sixties racing driver Ken Miles. Yet it is undeniable that his reputation as a Hollywood star with a flickering temperament was cast in iron on Terminator and that he has never entirely recovered. And unlike the real John Connor he can’t just jump back in time and start over.

I want to make it clear, I am embarrassed by it,” Bale had said. “I regret it. I ask everybody to sit down and ask themselves if they have ever had a bad day and lost their temper and really regretted it immensely.”