STACK #135 Jan 2016

EXTRAS NEWS

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SURF'S UP!

L uke Bracey can’t keep the grin off his face as he chats with surf legend Laird Hamilton, 51, his instructor on the remake of action adventure movie Point Break . “To hang out with Laird and all these other extreme sports legends was intimidating at first,” says Bracey, 26. “People at the top of their game in what they do – and what they do is terribly exciting and terribly dangerous. I felt very lucky to spend time in their company.” Raised on Sydney’s North Beaches, he’s looking forward to trying out some of his new board moves when he returns home for the holidays. “Not all the sports I learned for the film came so naturally, like the rock climbing. I did hours upon hours inside the gym but then you get to Angel Falls and its 3000ft off that ledge and they go, ‘Are you ready to go over the edge, Luke?’ and you go, ‘Yup!’ And it really informs where you are, you can’t fake that. As much as you can sit there and visualise 3000ft, unless its actually there, you don’t get that real sweat,” says Bracey, who reprises the role of Johnny Utah first made famous by Keanu Reeves 25 years ago. Growing up, Point Break was one of his favourite films. “It seemed to be on TV every weekend during the '90s and me and every single one of my mates can quote it from start to finish. “Being a surfer, it was a pretty seminal film in my life. It’s all about going for it and no cowards: Are we going to jump off this thing or not? And I think it permeated how we lived our lives when we went surfing – all we wanted to do was surf a bigger wave. We didn’t live in Hawaii so we didn’t get 40-footers but when you’re ten years old and its eight foot above you, it’s a bit bigger than you thought it was from the beach. Point Break represents a piece of my childhood that went all the way through into adulthood until I got to this position now.” He received the audition notice while home visiting family two years ago. “For the next week, my friends and I lived our lives purely by quotes from the original movie. My mum got pretty sick of it after a while.” Gill Pringle

BY THE NUMBERS Christian Bale learns the fine art of investment fund management in the financial crash comedyTHE BIG SHORT.

EXTRAS

W ho better to explain the 2008 financial crisis than a naked Margot Robbie in a bubble bath? However, its Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Steve Carell and Christian Bale who do the real heavy lifting in The Big Short , making a comedy out of the financial meltdown. Portraying real-life investment fund manager Dr. Mike Burry, Bale nailed every aspect of his personality, from his obsession with numbers to his passion for heavy metal drumming. In real life, Bale hasn’t a clue about finances. “I’m terrible with numbers, but a few years back, I had to figure out some investments. And I’m an actor, so I just pretended to be somebody who adores numbers, and I would go through and leave no page unturned, and I actually did pretty bloody well with them. But it didn’t last – I’m really somebody who couldn’t be less interested in that world. Fortunately my wife is very good at that kind of thing, so I leave it to her.” As ever, Bale relished

our chairs, we just talked non-stop. And it was fascinating, a really wonderful conversation, and I liked his company a great deal.” He did recognise some parallels between himself and Burry. “In terms of brain capacity, noooo. Not at all,” he smiles. “But what I believe we share in common is that I do what I do because I am obsessed with it, and I have a passion and a love and a hate for it, and never did I expect to really earn a living, let alone a very good living at it, but it all came from that motivation. And that’s what I see in Mike as well; as opposed to a clichéd Wall Street guy desperate for power and money, Mike came at it from a point of view of an obsession with numbers.” The real Dr. Burry made a fortune for his clients, despite the stress he endured when his clients believed he was making a risky bet. “He got very ill through that whole period, largely because of some of these relationships where people got furious at him, and even afterwards

when he had earned them a fortune and he was proven correct, they still remain furious. It’s confusion beyond belief. It really disillusioned him,” says Bale. Gill Pringle

studying the real Dr. Burry. “I love that part of the work. You get to ask questions and study people in a way that you’d be considered a creepy stalker under other circumstances. We actually sat together for about nine hours; we didn’t get up from

The Big Short is in cinemas on Jan 21

Point Break is in cinemas on Jan 1

JANUARY 2016

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