‘Vice’ trailer puts Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney front and center

Academy Award winner Christian Bale is back to his transformation tricks, this time morphing into former Vice President Dick Cheney, the mastermind behind the Iraq War and so much more.

As a previous Secretary of Defense and White House Chief of Staff under the Nixon, Ford and first Bush presidencies, Cheney oversaw decades of US government actions in countries around the word with intimate detail and involvement. The film will also detail his tenure at Halliburton. He was and is still largely seen as the puppetmaster pulling the strings behind the the George W. Bush administration.

For the role, Bale once again went to extremes – packing on 40lbs, bleaching his eyebrows and shaving his head (we saw the aftermath of that at Telluride last year), in sheer devotion to his method. His Oscar-winning turn in The Fighter was also a result of a dramatic weight change (a loss) in order to play a drugged up former boxer. 

This first Vice trailer gives us a lot of glimpses at its all-star cast and at the wide timeline it covers. Alongside Bale as Cheney is five-time Academy Award nominee Amy Adams as his wife Lynne Cheney, Academy Award nominee Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld (in a dramatic transformation himself, via makeup) and Academy Award winner Sam Rockwell as a doofus George W. Bush. 

The film is written and directed by Academy Award winner Adam McKay (The Big Short) and produced by Megan Ellison, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Adam McKay, Will Ferrell, and Kevin Messick for Annapurna, Plan B and Gary Sanchez Productions, respectively. 

Vice is set for wide release by Annapurna on Christmas Day.