In person, Bale creates an illusion of intimacy, though he’s very careful about what he shares: He’s married and has a two-year-old daughter, yet he politely deflects questions about his family. “I’m incredibly proud of them,” he explains. “I just believe that’s something not to talk about with people I’ve never met.”

Bale learned early about the costs of the spotlight after his breakthrough role in Steven Spielberg’s 1987 film Empire of the Sun, in which he played a war orphan. At the age of 13, Bale suddenly found himself hailed as a young actor to watch. While other teen actors of the era cashed in and lived large, Bale kept a low profile. There were no cheap teen comedies, and he didn’t tape himself having a threesome. Instead, Bale went about the business of making movies, racking up an impressive résumé: Little Women, Velvet Goldmine, American Psycho, Laurel Canyon, The Machinist, Batman Begins, Rescue Dawn. He’s proven especially adept at exploring the dark side. Of course, there have been missteps, like Reign of Fire (in which dragons take over modern London) and the low-intensity sci-fi thriller Equilibrium, but at least they’ve been interesting failures.

But with the busy year Bale’s been having so far, failure seems unlikely. He’s been getting great reviews for his performance in Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn. And this fall he has two movies coming out (3:10 to Yuma and I’m Not There), both by high-profile directors (Walk the Line helmer James Mangold and art-house darling Todd Haynes, respectively). This summer, Bale returned to Batman and to Chicago for the shooting of the sequel, The Dark Knight.

The actor’s time in Chicago has been, shall we say, unconventional. “I’ve primarily seen Chicago by night, from the inside of a cowl,” he says, referring to Batman’s famous headgear. “I’m very familiar with Lower Wacker Drive at night, the financial district at night. Standing on top of the Sears Tower was quite a peak experience, really.”

Rescue Dawn

And so far, he’s been able to remain somewhat anonymous, or at least unpestered. With a baseball cap and sunglasses, he can still pass for just an unusually fit guy, not a movie star. “I haven’t been high profile,” he says. “I would say most people would be very surprised. We go to the parks. We go to concerts. We go to the bars.”

He can remain so low-profile in part because he doesn’t travel with an entourage. His wife and daughter are with him in Chicago, but he doesn’t have a personal assistant or a publicity person on location, something almost unheard of for stars at his level. When we wonder aloud why that is, he has a surprising answer. “I’m just a grumpy son of a bitch,” he says bluntly. “And I couldn’t stand having somebody around the whole time. Really, I couldn’t. I would be throwing them out the door. I need my own space.”

But that self-effacing description doesn’t really match what others say about Bale. Mangold, who directed him in the upcoming Western 3:10 to Yuma, says Bale’s rep for serious intensity is all talk. “I don’t know that I’d nominate him as class clown, but he’s not a deacon,” says Mangold by phone. “He’s funny and lively and inventive and improvisational and full of ideas and social.” And I’m Not There director Haynes assures us that Bale is a fun-loving guy: “He takes his work and preparation seriously, as I do myself. But even if he’s still ‘in accent’ he’s the first actor to join the crew for beers at wrap.” (We’ll have to take their word for it; that’s not the Bale we see during the interview.)

Batman Begins

In 3:10 to Yuma, which opens September 7, Bale plays Dan Evans, a farmer whose basic goodness is tested when he takes a job escorting a charismatic murderer (Russell Crowe) to jail. Like Bale, Dan is a man used to being self-sufficient. “People [in the old West] were forced to be entirely responsible for themselves and for their decisions,” he explains. “You really had to have a very strong conviction about what you did. Nowadays I think you can be very lost if you don’t have that strong conviction.”

In the film, Dan has to choose between doing what he thinks is right and doing what is best for his family. It’s a choice that clearly resonates with an actor who has picked his roles without regard for whether they’d make him financially secure. “As a father, as somebody who has dependents, it can be a little trickier to really decide about the question, Do you live on your knees or die on your feet? How much of that is purely pride? What is it to really be the man?”

Bale’s next big role reunites him with Haynes, who directed him in the 1998 glam-rock epic Velvet Goldmine. In I’m Not There, due out in December, Bale is one of six actors who each embodies different aspects of Bob Dylan; the other actors include Bale’s Dark Knight costar Heath Ledger, as well as Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett. Bale plays both Dylan the ’60s folksinger and Dylan the ’80s born-again Christian. Though the idea sounds strange, it made perfect sense to Bale. “With I’m Not There, Todd sent me the script and he said, ‘You know the score, we made Velvet Goldmine,’ ” he says. “He didn’t need to explain anything to me. And really that was it.”

Bale is fully aware of the risks involved in playing a famous real person, but he refuses to let that shape his performance. “You can’t make a movie by committee,” he says. “You have to say at some point, ‘This is my interpretation.’ I might not convince everybody about it. Not everybody may like it. And everyone will see different things in Dylan. But this is what I see.”

3:10 to Yuma

In the meantime, Bale is enjoying the chance to return to a character he’s already played. At first he was uncertain about revisiting the role of Batman; he rewatched the first film to make sure he remembered what he’d done. “I found it just like riding a bicycle,” he recalls. “It just eliminated the period when you’re still questioning everything that you do, instead of striding purposefully through it. We were able to stride purposefully right from the get-go.”

We remind Bale that when he discussed Batman Begins with TOC two years ago, he relished the chance to explore Batman as a “schizophrenic freak.” There’s homicidal rage in Bale’s eyes when Batman dangles a criminal from a building, and yet his drunken, pampered Bruce Wayne is utterly believable, too. Did The Dark Knight give him a chance to explore that further? “I’m not using subtle terminology saying ‘schizophrenic freak,’ but he’s not a healthy person,” Bale says. “It’s quite clear from the way that he behaves that this is somebody who has a certain Jekyll and Hyde quality…. It’s probably more accurate to say multiple personality. I would break that up into three different personalities that he has.”

Asked to explain the three personalities of Batman, Bale takes a characteristic pause and then explains: “Well, I would say that there is the beast of Batman. Then there is the public Bruce Wayne, who must never be suspected of ever being capable of being Batman. And then,” Bale says, as he makes an unconscious connection to his own personal life, “there’s the private Bruce Wayne, who he only allows two or three people to ever see.”

3:10 to Yuma hits theaters September 7; I’m Not There will be released in December.

For our 2005 interview with Christian Bale and his thoughts on the "schizophrenic freak" he plays , see Bat out of hell