Christian Bale stars in two films screening at the Dubai International Film Festival this week: Out of the Furnace, in which he plays a steel mill worker caught up in an unlikely crime ring, and the much-anticipated American Hustle, which grabbed an assortment of Screen Actor's Guild and Golden Globe nominations this week and closes out the festival with a red carpet gala at Madinat Jumeirah Saturday night.
In the first film, shot in the spring of 2012 in Pittsburgh, Bale is taught and sinewy, with a moustache and goatee, longish, slicked-back hair and a neck tattoo. A year later, he was sporting quite the pot belly, after packing on as much as 22 kilograms to portray the 70s-era con artist Irving Rosenfield in David O Russell's followup to Silver Linings Playbook. The hair? Tricked into a impressive comb-over:
