Christian Bale had to stop speaking to Chris Rock on the set in Amsterdam

Method acting gets a bad rap for often coming across as annoying and pretentious, but at least the way Christian Bale does it — losing a lot of weight, gaining a lot of weight, occasionally yelling at a cameraman on set Terminator Redemption for disrupting his work—is less annoying than the “I’m going to act like an asshole for playing an asshole” shit that certain Jared Letos do (not that we’re going to call any particular Jared Letos). The recent example of Bale taking acting very seriously is actually a bit funny: He said IndieWire that he had to stop speaking to Chris Rock on the set of David O. Russell Amsterdam because rock is just too funny.

Bale said Russell made a point of introducing him to Rock and getting Rock to tell “some stories” that he knew would really make Bale laugh, so he said he ” loved” when the first ones started working together. At one point, however, Bale realized that Rock is “so damn funny” that he couldn’t act around him and that it would just be “Christian laughing at Chris Rock” instead of whatever Amsterdam things he should do. So Bale said he had to go to Rock and say, “Dude, I love talking to you and we have mutual friends, but I can’t anymore.” He said Russell didn’t cast him in the film, to seeing him “giggle,” adding, “He wants me to be Burt and I’m forgetting how to be Burt.”

Bale also explained that he tries to “isolate” himself on set because if he gets to know too well the “incredible people” he works with, he won’t be able to believe what he’s doing on the scene. This may all seem like a bummer for rock, but at least we know that Christian Bale’s words like “we can’t be friends because you’re too funny” aren’t the worst thing a famous person has done to him lately.