'Vice' Is Nominated For 6 Golden Globes — Here's What Went on Behind the Scenes

The man behind Anchorman, Step Brothers, and The Big Short now brings us Vice, the dramedy that details Dick Cheney's rise to political power. In telling the tale of George W. Bush's charismatic vice president, director Adam McKay and his army of A-listers have had their ups, downs - and a few calls from furious former cabinet members.

Despite lampooning the Bush administration throughout his time as a writer at Saturday Night Live, it wasn't until Adam McKay was feeling ill in 2016 that he took the Dick Cheney biography off of his bookshelf and became inspired to tell the former Vice President's story.

When the director told Bale that "months of emails were never archived (while Cheney was in the White House)," the Oscar winner began to show real interest in taking the role.

Bale is no stranger to changing his weight to fit the character he's playing, but this time he took his transformation one step further. Not only did he gain 40 pounds - he also bleached his eyebrows so they looked more like the former Vice President's.

To play Dick Cheney's wife Lynne, Adams too had to take on a different body type. She put on between 12 and 15 pounds and claims that it helped her performance, "I felt that Lynne was somebody who was very grounded and had a lot of gravitas in the way that she walked; she was not flirty or light in any way. As I started to embrace her connection to the earth, that's when it started really clicking in," Adams told The Hollywood Reporter.

When you're a 44-year-old former Batman with a full head of hair, it takes more than just packing on some pounds to play a bald sexagenarian. Bale would arrive at the makeup trailer at 2:30am to get prepped for shooting.

After six months of makeup trials, McKay was blown away when they finally got it right. "It made the hair on my neck stand up."

Despite McKay's desire to have his actors avoid interacting with the people they would be portraying on screen, Perry phoned the former Secretary of State to discuss the role. How did it go? Well, the two exchanged copies of their most recent books after their discussion.

The legendary music producer told GQ that Powell called to vent his frustrations over the portrayal. He connected Powell with Perry so the two of them could talk it out.

It was used in early test screenings before the name changed to Vice.

Sam Rockwell, who plays President George W. Bush, and Steve Carrell, who plays Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, were at times encouraged to go off-script along with Bale and Adams.

McKay told The Hollywood Reporter "I had this moment, 'Should we go ahead with this?' and then we discussed it and said, 'It's actually more relevant."

McKay told The New York Times that while Bale was researching heart attacks while preparing to play Cheney (who has suffered several), he learned that queasiness, in addition to pain in the arms, is a lesser-known symptom. The director noticed this in himself during a workout and got a headstart on the necessary next steps.

In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter's Tatiana Seigel, the director said, "George W. Bush is really going to hate this movie."

They were both born on January 30th (33 years apart). What are the chances?

Bale wasn't able to meet Cheney, but he told The Hollywood Reporter that he "would greatly have liked to have met with him, if only to have him insult me and kick me out of his house. To me, that’s honorable."

The director has supported many left-leaning candidates in the past, but he told The Hollywood Reporter that he finds Trump's somewhat scattered approach to the presidency over Cheney's purposeful plotting.

After an advance screening of Vice, the funnyman with a knack for knocking corrupt people and power structures noted "After covering the financial collapse with one movie and covering what I guess I could most optimistically call the transformation of American democracy, I wouldn’t mind going back and doing a comedy with Will Ferrell."

According to The New York Times, however, one of his daughters has followed McKay on Twitter.