Although he has spent the vast majority of his career putting on convincing American accents, Christian Bale is actually British, or Welsh to get more specific. At this stage of his career, Bale had been using his natural accent far more frequently, so casting this Brit in the lead role of a film with "American" in the title was a bit of an outside-the-box casting decision, but one that director Mary Harron made knowingly.
As Bale explained in a press junket interview, part of what drew Harron to him in the first place was that he wasn't from the U.S., whereas most of the others actors interested in the role were born and raised in America. She wanted him to bring his perspective on America as an outsider to the role. She thought he would be capable of seeing Bateman as a representative of wealth and privilege in a way that a U.S. native might not be able to. Bale described his perspective on the cultural component of the character, saying, "He is the image of, sort of, the American dream of glamour, wealth, you know, sophistication," adding, "Bateman couldn't exist outside of ... New York, outside of his offices."
