He slips into the room without fanfare, rumpled and unshaven, blue hoodie, tan pants, black sneakers, raybans. the shoulders are slumped, the hands buried in the marsupial pocket of the hoodie. Nothing to see here. Did Christian Bale stop to jack a Santa Monica liquor store on his way over to Shutters on the Beach He walks slowly, on his heels, toward the terrace. He does not look right, at the couple taking coffee, or left, at the only other person in the lounge this morning. When I stand, he points at me, or my table, or my general area—still without turning to look at me, his eyes fid on the terrace in front of him—and in his low English accent asks, "We doin’ this here or what"

Click here to listen to audio of Bale 2019's epic onset blowup.

What is this Petulance Efficiency Both Christian Bale detests interviews, on the predictable grounds that his offscreen life is nobody’s business, but also because he thinks the whole enterprise of movie star "journalism"—the appetite for it, as well as the sating of that appetite—corrosive to acting and storytelling. It encourages people to look for the wrong things.

This opener—"here or what"—is less interesting for what it is than for what it skips—the part where we shake hands and say hello and I thank him for taking the time, and he says, "Don’t mention it," and…smiles. Or something. Let’s just get through this, right Now he looks at me. Or at least faces me. I can’t see his eyes behind the RayBans and won’t at any point today, because he doesn’t take them off. I walk over, offer up my name and my hand. After a moment, he takes it. Neither limp nor manly, the shake. Al dente, more like. He points his chin at the sundeck. "How ’bout out there" Right.

On the deck, he sits in shadow (makes it harder for Skynet’s aerial search and destroy robots), his posture hunched. The hands remain in the pouch, emerging only when needed for the purpose of sipping decaffeinated coffee. (To waiter: "This is decaf, right ’Cause I go_crazy_if…") He answers a great number of questions thusly: "Yeah. Right." These yeah rights are most often preceded by a blank stillness, though occasionally by a flubbery lipped exhalation that falls somewhere on the gestural spectrum between eye-rolling and expectoration.

I ask if I can tape, he says sure, and I’m reaching for the recorder when I notice the mondo BandAid on his left index finger. He shrugs, makes a sawing motion over the finger with his other hand, matter-of-factly says, "Cut off the tip." A kitchen accident, I guess, and am about to move on when it occurs to me: At some point we’re going to talk about his howling four-minute profane rant at the director of photography on the set of Terminator Salvation last summer—the one that went viral (in both its unabridged and dance remix versions) after hitting the Web in early February. Of course we are. He knows it. I know it. By way of going there, and in the spirit of just getting through it, I muster a saccharine Stuart Smalley voice and ask if the wound was "really an accident" and if he "has anger." He says, "Nah," but the explanation—and much of what he says for the next few minutes—is so mumbly quiet and sluggishly reserved that only later, when transcribing, do I register the explanation: "motorcycle accident." Turns out Christian Bale had the tip of his finger surgically reattached several days prior, after lopping it off in a bike crash.