Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) hit back at actor Christian Bale on Sunday after he called her father “Satan” during his Golden Globes acceptance speech on Sunday.
As he accepted the Best Actor award for his role as Cheney in Vice, Bale said, “Thank you to Satan for giving me inspiration on how to play this role.”
Explaining the decision to cast him in the role, Bale said that director Adam McKay wanted to find “somebody that can be absolutely charisma-free and reviled by everybody” and was “cornering the market on the charisma-free assholes.”
“What do you think, Mitch McConnell next?” Bale quipped.
However, Cheney’s daughter Liz sought to protect her father from the attacks by exposing Bale’s own past behavior.
“Satan probably inspired him to do this, too,” Cheney wrote, accompanied by an Independent article from 2008 detailing Bale’s arrest for allegedly assaulting a mother and sister following the European premiere of The Dark Knight.
Despite his harsh words on Sunday, Bale previously praised the former vice president for his devotion to his family and his desire to learn.
“He was a wonderful family man — he’s a great dad, he’s an avid reader, he has a brain like a vice and he constantly reads history,” Bale told Fox News last month. ”He was very laid-back. He would have been very happy to be a lineman in Wyoming if he hadn’t met Lynne, who said to him, ‘No, that doesn’t cut it. You need some ambition.’ What would have been if they hadn’t met?”
Yet most critics concluded that Vice was an unfavorable take on Cheney as a man and a politician, depicting him as a power-hungry “cartoon villain” with little regard for the wider consequences of his neo-conservative agenda. Nevertheless, the film experienced relative success on Sunday evening, gaining six nominations including Bale’s award for Best Actor.
Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com.