Christian Bale wants to play Shaun Ryder in a Happy Mondays biopic

Actor Christian Bale, star of The Dark Knight trilogy, American Psycho and many more films during his 36-year career so far, has revealed the musician he most wants to play in a movie. Watch the full video interview below.

Bale has already appeared in more than 50 films since his 1987 debut in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, but has yet to put his name to a blockbuster music biopic like Rocketman or Bohemian Rhapsody.

Happy Mondays singer Shaun Ryder has always fascinated Bale, he said in a new interview with NME. “He was always such an interesting figure. I grew up loving the Happy Mondays, so yeah, it’d be a lot of fun to play.”

Unfortunately for Bale, Skins actor Jack O’Connell is already set to play Ryder in a biopic directed by Matt Greenhalgh, who penned John Lennon origin story Nowhere Boy and Control, about late Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. Based on Ryder’s 2011 autobiography Twisting My Melon, no release date has yet been announced for the film which also stars James Nelson-Joyce as the Mondays’ maracas-wielding dancer Bez, but Bale conceded he’d probably lost his chance to portray Ryder.

“Oh well there you go I’ve lost the part then!” he said when NME informed him of the news about Twisting My Melon. “I’m probably too old now if they’re doing it in his heyday.”

Bale is currently promoting his first Netflix film, The Pale Blue Eye, which sees him play a world-weary detective who is hired to investigate the murder of a soldier at an American military academy. Along the way, he meets a trainee cadet and they work together to unravel the case. The young man, played by Harry Potter actor Harry Melling, is a fictionalised version of acclaimed writer and poet Edgar Allen Poe.

“It’s a lovely origin story about Poe,” Bale said. “it’s a fictionalised account of how my character Augustus Landor, the hardboiled detective with many regrets, would’ve influenced Poe into becoming the godfather of the detective story, the godfather of the macabre and the hard-drinking man that he came to be.”

‘The Pale Blue Eye’ is in cinemas from December 23, and on Netflix from January 6

The post Christian Bale wants to play Shaun Ryder in a Happy Mondays biopic appeared first on NME.