Christian Bale’s performance in “American Psycho” is one of his most acclaimed, although his castmates on set didn’t seem to think so.

Bale discusses how his co-stars first misunderstood his acting technique as Bateman in a new oral history from Moviemaker.

Bale featured as the psychopathic investment banker Patrick Bateman in the famous Mary Harron-directed 2000 film, which was based on Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 book of the same name.

“Josh Lucas and I did a film together recently and he opened my eyes to something that I had been unaware of,” Bale stated. “He informed me that all of the other actors thought that I was the worst actor they’d ever seen. He was telling me they kept looking at me and talking about me, saying, ‘Why did Mary fight for this guy? He’s terrible.’ And it wasn’t until he saw the film that he changed his mind. And I was in the dark completely about that critique.”

Obviously, everyone can laugh at how dumb and naïve they were for dismissing Bale’s portrayal in “American Psycho” in retrospect. Even though the film has flaws, many people like it, notably because of Bale’s acting. It’s difficult to picture anybody else in Patrick Bateman’s shoes.

Chloe Sevigny, his co-star, described his method acting as follows:

“Working with Christian was pretty hard because I didn’t know this whole Method thing. I was pretty fresh. I hadn’t done that many films before, and that an actor would lose himself to such a degree and was so consumed by the part, I was having a hard time kind of… just wanting to socialize with him, but feeling that he didn’t, and then my ego being like, ‘Does he not like me? Does he think I’m a terrible actress?’”

Bale’s reputation for method acting is now famed, but it was jarring for people who weren’t familiar with his techniques at the time. The payoff, on the other hand, was magnificent, to the point that director Mary Harrom said he was able to break into a sweat “at the same time, every time” during the film’s iconic business card scene.

“He was just so 100 percent committed as an actor to being this character, to a disturbing point,” Guinevere Turner added. “He never spoke in his real accent and he never socialised with anyone while we were shooting.”

Bale’s goal, as he describes in the oral history, was to turn Patrick Bateman into a soulless monster. Here’s how he and Mary Harron felt about the character:

“I think the thing that united us on it is I had no interest in his background, childhood—and she didn’t either. We looked at him as an alien who landed in the unabashedly capitalist New York of the ’80s, and looked around and said, ‘How do I perform like a successful male in this world?’ And that was our beginning point. And we didn’t want to talk about why was he this way, what happened in his childhood—there was none of that between Mary and I.”

Bale is slated to reunite with filmmaker David O. Russell for the third time in a new untitled movie, according to reports from last month.