With over 50 films to his credit in a career that's lasted over 50 years, no wonder Christopher Walken claims he comes from another world. Read on to discover which performances Walken considers his best, what he names as the strangest thing he's ever seen, and why playing Elvis as a woman was one of his scariest experiences.
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In just the last four years, Christopher Walken has appeared in 15 films, including Pulp Fiction, Search and Destroy, The Prophecy, The Addiction, A Business Affair, Nick of Time, Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead, Basquiat, Last Man Standing, The Funeral, Touch, Suicide Kings, Excess Baggage, Mouse Hunt and Antz, plus several straight-to-video films, including The Prophecy II. He has six others in the can--_Blast From the Past, New Rose Hotel, Illuminata, Kiss Toledo Goodbye, Ballad of the Nightingale_ and Trance. He claims that he's been in the business so long (52 of his 55 years) that he's not from this planet, but from the planet Show Business.
He and his two brothers attended the Professional Children's School in Manhattan and ' worked in commercials and early live TV. Ronald, which is Christopher's real first name, never thought of doing anything else. He worked first in theater, not appearing in a movie until he was 26, when he landed a small part in Me and My Brother. Two years later, in 1971, he got his second film, The Anderson Tapes. This was followed by his first lead role in 1972's The Happiness Cage, 1976's_ Next Stop Greenwich Village_ and 1977's Annie Hall. He wasn't the overnight sensation he seemed when he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in 1978's The Deer Hunter. But if he started slow, he picked up extraordinary speed, playing a long string of exotic eccentrics in chillers like The Dead Zone, in outré violent fare like Abel Ferrara's King of New York, in arty films like The Comfort of Strangers, in farces like Batman Returns, and in cult masterpieces like True Romance.
There is no other American actor remotely like Chris Walken. "There's a great line in Don Quixote," he says, "where Dulcinea says to Don Quixote, 'What are you trying to do by behaving in this way?' And he says, 'I hope to add some measure of grace to the world.'" The same could be said of Walken--it's just that he has an odd idea of grace.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: You've done an extraordinary number of movies--over a dozen in just the last three years.
CHRISTOPHER WALKEN: Yeah, I've been averaging four or five a year. Sometimes they're just a few days' job. I'm glad to have these jobs--otherwise I start walking around the house talking to myself.
Q: Your upcoming film Blast From the Past seems like one of the more accessible movies you've appeared in.
A: I play an inventor who builds an elaborate bomb shelter under my house. When the Cuban Missile Crisis starts, I think it's the end of the world and I take my family and lock us down there for 35 years. We live an idyllic life--though my son [Brendan Fraser] grows up without seeing a girl. When we finally come out he meets and falls in love with Alicia Silver-stone. It's a nice story. I don't often read a script and then feel it's wonderful. Usually I think, "How am I gonna figure this out?" This made me laugh.
Q: What kind of ant do you play in the animated film Antz?
A: Gene Hackman plays a Coriolanus ant and I play his sidekick, Col. Cutter.
Q: Will there be a toy based on your ant?
A: I don't know--that would be great if there's money in it. I've made a few bucks on my Max Schreck Batman Returns cards.
Q: What are some of your own favorite performances?
A: I enjoyed myself in At Close Range. I love my dance number in Pennies From Heaven. My performance in The Dead Zone was good. I like King of New York. My bits in True Romance, Pulp Fiction. My performance in Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead was very interesting because it was very focused--I was just a head.
Q: You've played Hamlet. Were you a good Hamlet?
A: I wasn't very good. The good Shakespeare roles for me were Coriolanus, Iago and Antonio in The Tempest. I was pretty good as the dreaded Scotsman. I'd like to play that again. I'd also be better as Romeo now than when I first played him.
Q: Romeo was a teenager.
A: I know, but now I could play it.
Q: What makes an actor great?
A: Talent. Magic. Actors are priests. They are a conduit from something very powerful to the people. That's why when you go to the theater or to the movies you are moved in some way--to laugh, to get a hard-on, to feel compassion. Good acting has a lot to do with the way you were when you were eight years old--you play. It usually has to do with having a good time. Most good actors are very playful.
Q: If actors are priests, who's the Pope?
A: Brando was the boss of American actors in my lifetime. He was a genius. He really did change things. I heard a story about him. Somebody asked him once how he intended to play a part. He said, "I think of this character as a giant tomato." [Laughs] That's a great story. When I think about great actors, I also think of De Niro. In The Deer Hunter there was a big scene, I worked on it for weeks. I came in and had all this stuff prepared, [but] I said to Bob, "I don't know what to do." He said, "Do this," and he walked in the door, made these movements. And that's just what I did. It was terrific. He knew what to do, I didn't.
Q: You've been in some classic movie scenes: the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter, for example, and the scene between you and Dennis Hopper in True Romance.
A: In True Romance, that was something that happened between me and Dennis. People often say we improvised, but not at all. Every word was scripted. That's the way Quentin Tarantino writes, like a play--big speeches. The first take was on Dennis, and he started telling that story and I started to laugh off camera and it made him laugh. Then when they turned it around and shot me and we got to the same place, I started to laugh again and he started to laugh. It was like in school when you can't stop laughing and the teacher's mad at you. It looked pretty serious on the page--him calling me a Sicilian eggplant, I take out a gun and shoot him--but all that laughing and kissing and "what-a-guy" stuff happened out of doing it. I think it's because Dennis is very mischievous.
Q: Did you know you were creating a memorable scene?
A: Yes, absolutely. Dennis invited me to dinner afterwards and we were sitting at the table with a few other people and he looked at me and said, "We did a good scene today" Yeah, you can tell.
Q: You've said that when you pull the trigger of a gun, you always know you're in a movie--is it that you can't imagine ever pulling the trigger for real?
A: Absolutely Impossible.
Q: So if someone came up to you the way you did to Johnny Depp in Nick of Time, and said, Kill the governor or we'll kill your daughter . . . ?
A: I'd have a nervous breakdown. I'd just collapse and they'd realize they shouldn't use me.
Q: And that was the problem with the movie--the premise was silly.
A: Well, I still hoped people would like it. That's my bread and butter. My movies aren't that successful. It's hard to be in a successful movie.
Q: One of your films, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, was spectacularly unsuccessful. Why did this picture have so much trouble?
A: It took twice as long as it was supposed to take. You look at that movie and you can see in certain scenes that the actors, including myself, have been there so long doing the same thing that they don't even know where they are. There is a look on faces in that movie that's, "Where?" "Who?" "Was I born in Montana?" "Am I ever going home?" And because it was not shot in sequence, you see some scenes toward the end of the movie that were shot in the beginning and everybody is full of juice, and then it's 10 minutes later in the movie but it was shot five months later, and the actors are different weights, shapes, and they have that "Where am I?" look.
Q: After you finished that film, you got into a bad fight on the street where you live in Manhattan. What happened?
A: Right across the street from where I live, some guys had a boom box and it was really loud. I was walking to the store on the corner and I said to one of them, "Turn down the music." I don't think I was nice about it. The other guy started swinging at me. I was protecting myself from him when the first guy took a stick from the garbage can and broke my nose with it. He could have knocked my eye out, that's what pissed me off. He didn't give a shit.
Q: You live near Hayden Planetarium. Have you ever looked into telescopes and searched the skies for UFOs?
A: I did a few years ago. I was a member of an amateur astronomy club. I once rented a house in L.A. that had a telescope and there was a house across the way where they made porn movies, a lot of girls running around in teddies. The permanent residents wanted to get them out, but to me it didn't matter. I had my telescope.
Q: What's the strangest thing you've ever personally seen?
A: James Brown in Tel Aviv. Israeli rock fans don't sit, they stand while the music is going, thousands of them. It was a completely drug-free rock concert, totally square. James Brown was up there, he had the cape, the high shoes, but he was old already, and he wasn't doing the old James Brown stuff. It was the weirdest thing I ever saw outside of a live show in Copenhagen where couples would come onstage, all very civilized, and then they showed a porn movie of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in which all the dwarfs were doing her, then the devil came at the end and the wicked witch and it became an orgy--all very well done. I could have bought it for $75 but somebody said to me, "Don't take a chance, you'll get into trouble coming into America." I got intimidated.
Q: Are you easily intimidated?
A: Yeah, I can be intimidated. By anything.
Q: Didn't you used to watch porn movies with friends when you were younger?
A: Yeah, on the side of the icebox. It's a perfect place.
Q: So you still call refrigerators iceboxes?
A: I'm coming from the '50s. It was real film, 16 millimeter, which would crack and bum and you'd fix it with Scotch tape. The guys in the film would have their shoes and socks on. But I don't find porn very sexy, it's too much information.
Q: Do you recall saying, "Pornos are like looking through a keyhole, and maybe that's what all movies are all about"?
A: I find it hard to believe that I said that. Maybe I did. But I don't think that looking at movies is like looking through a keyhole. When you look at a great painting, you see the world that exists within that frame. It's like Michelangelo said about the David statue--it was there, he just took the stone away. A movie director or a painter puts something within its frame that is its own world. A good movie changes you a little bit. I'm not sure pornography can do that.
Q: Didn't you once write a script about the porno star John Holmes?
A: Yeah, it was the last night shooting King of New York and Abel Ferrara and I were sitting at four a.m. and this guy handed me a Village Voice article about John Holmes. He had died already. He was this simple guy whose father was abusive, and he came to L.A. to work as a handyman, and he never realized that he had this great gift. [Laughs] He didn't even know that everybody wasn't like him. It's sort of a funny story, [although] he ended up stealing radios from cars and he died of AIDS. I told his story in my script but I gave it a happy ending, a dream thing where he's very sick and stumbling along and goes back to his apartment and he has this fantasy life with this Donna Reed wife and kids and dog.
Q: In your script, do you show his dick?
A: No, nothing like that. It's a nice story. Basically it's about the curse of a great gift. It's like Mozart. [Laughs]
Q: Another icon whom you've written about is Elvis Presley. Why is the public so fascinated with him?
A: Because he really was great and he died young. I worked with an actor who told me a funny story about Elvis. He was in this movie, one of those beach things, and he asked Elvis if he wanted to play touch football on their day off. Elvis agreed and said he'd bring some guys with him. A bus came with Elvis and his guys all in professional football outfits, helmets, padding, and they went out and played the guys who had nothing on. And his guys wouldn't let anybody near him. [Laughs]
Q: What did you think of his films?
A: They're all worth watching--_Jailhouse Rock, Blue Hawaii_. I always liked it when he played a simple cowhand, like he was just a regular guy working with the other cowhands. And he looked exactly like Elvis. He was the first actor to get $1 million.
Q: What's your favorite Elvis song?
A: "Are You Lonesome Tonight." That's the one.
Q: What inspired you to write and perform in a play about him?
A: When I was doing Batman Returns I had a house and was living very quietly, reading the tabloids from the supermarket. One day there was this picture of Elvis as a middle-aged woman with great big knockers. The story said he had changed himself into a woman. So I just took it from there. I invented this story where he's not dead, he's in limbo with his twin brother. He had a twin brother who was stillborn. So I stuck him in the play, only his brother is a little younger and better looking and he hates him. And he's trying to get out of limbo. Finally he decides to come back as a woman who works in a diner and is married to an overweight truck driver. That was the last scene--I came out in drag with great big boobs, and my husband was sitting with his feet up watching TV and drinking a beer. I did it eight times a week, and six times a week it was funny and twice it wasn't. Doing the Elvis play was the hardest thing I ever did, but I noticed that immediately afterwards, so many things were easier. I've had a couple of times like that, where you just get so scared and so defiant of being scared.
Q: Why so scared?
A: Every time I got really scared I'd say to myself, "Who cares? That's the way it goes." I must say that saved me. Because when I thought, "Oh my God, my friends are gonna come, and I'm 50-something years old, and the critics are coming..." then I thought, "Who gives a fuck?"
Q: What bothers you about things said of you?
A: Nobody's ever said anything that's hurt me. Being called creepy doesn't hurt me, but it makes me wonder what people are seeing. I read a review of The Prophecy--I'm a lot of fun in that movie, I enjoyed playing this angel who's furious at human beings and just kicks the shit out of everybody. But anyway, I read this review and the critic said something that had nothing to do with my performance. When I read something like that I wonder what the guy's seeing. How could his impression be so different from mine?
Q: What movies have you seen more than any other?
A: Spartacus and Broadway Danny Rose. That's my double bill.
Q: What's the worst movie ever made?
A: I'm not going to say, but I think I was in it.
Q: What's your favorite dying scene?
A: It's in a very obscure movie called Lucky Luciano. When this gangster gets shot in the end, it takes place on a street where there are 50 feet of garbage cans lined up, and he knocks every one of them over, falling down and getting up. It's the longest death scene I ever saw. It's hilarious.
Q: When did you have your first sexual experience?
A: Oh, I must have been 19.
Q: If you could have changed one thing about that first sexual experience, what would it be?
A: It would have been successful.
Q: Is there any lie you've told girls you'd like to retract?
A: I promise I won't come.
Q: Why didn't you like high school?
A: I wasn't learning anything. I remember once I was failing in math and my father locked me in his bedroom for a whole weekend. My mother brought food and it was left outside the door. Him and me, we worked all day, we went to sleep, we got up and we did it again for two-and-a-half days. And I passed. And to this day I'm very good at certain things with numbers, with money, figures, estimates.
Q: So you got more than reading out of school.
A: School was boring most of the time. It finally was a social event where you hit on girls.
Q: Were you successful at that?
A: No, not at all.
Q: That's why you hated school. If you'd been successful hitting on girls you'd have loved it.
A: Tell that to the commissioners. I've always been lousy at striking up a conversation. If I walk up to a strange woman and strike up a conversation, I probably make her nervous. [Laughs] It just doesn't work out. I finally walked up to a girl once and I said to her, "Would you like me to go away?" She just looked at me in a scared way.
Q: Maybe your professional reputation preceded you.
A: The good thing about being an actor is if they know who you are-- you don't have to introduce yourself.
Q: And if they don't know who you are, you get to do what you do best--act your way into their hearts.
A: It's true, part of it is tenacity--and I do have that. I've always been that way. My father's like that. My mother's like that. My whole family's like that. Very aggressive people--but in a good way. My father was a baker, and he was like a terror to the people who worked for him. But he worked hard, and I believe in that. People don't work hard enough.
Q: Did your father discipline you?
A: My father never laid a hand on us. Never. But my mother, I have a feeling he would nod at her and she'd give us a whack. But when I was growing up, there was more of that "spare the rod and spoil the child" type thing. All my friends used to regularly get a whack from their mothers. Now everything has changed. I came from a neighborhood where if you got in a fight with a kid and he beat you up, basically what would happen is this: he'd throw you on the ground and get your arm behind your back and he'd say, "Say Uncle." When you finally said it, he'd let you go and you'd shake hands. That's how dopey it was then. Nowadays, they take out a nine millimeter and shoot you and your whole family.
Q: Have either of your parents criticized you about the films you make?
A: My mother, absolutely. She always says to me, "Why can't you make a nice film?"
Q: She probably still has memories of your childhood years on live TV.
A: Absolutely. She'd tell me how to read my lines. In TV they used kids as furniture almost. They'd say, "OK, put a bunch of them over here." It would be holiday shows mostly, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving. I worked with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin on _The Colgate Comedy Hour _when I was 10.
Q: What were your favorite TV shows as a kid?
A: Kids' shows didn't interest me that much. Maybe because I was there and saw it happening. I worked on the same floor as Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody. J. Fred Muggs, the chimp, used to drive his miniature motorcycle up and down the halls of the eighth floor at NBC. You know the movie My Favorite Year? They show some of that kind of stuff, but I actually remember the Chesterfield or Lucky Strike girl with the woman's legs coming out the bottom of a life-size package. I remember Mr. Peanut with a hat on.
Q: Was it like a hallucination?
A: Except that it was real. It was its own kind of life, and that's what I mean about the planet Show Business.
Q: Did your opinion of TV change after you appeared with Glenn Close in Sarah, Plain and Tall?
A: TV's very tricky. When Sarah, Plain and Tall _came out I was in London where the Agatha Christie play _The Mousetrap was celebrating its 40th anniversary. They estimated eight million people had seen it. Glenn Close called me and told me that 80 million people in America had seen Sarah in one night. That's what being a TV actor is. Mary Tyler Moore, James Garner, Johnny Carson, those people who have been on TV a long time, that's really amazing. Henry Winkler is one of the best TV actors I ever saw. The Fonz? [Lee] Strasberg loved him--he used to talk about him in class.
Q: Was Strasberg a good teacher?
A: I found him rather severe. He had humor, but you rarely saw it. Elia Kazan was the best acting teacher I ever saw. He says such simple things. At the Actor's Studio there were these people who'd [act like] some kind of Delphic mysteries were being imparted. Such seriousness. I said to somebody once, "Please, I'm getting a headache." She said to me, "You just don't understand." I haven't been there in 10 years for that reason.
Q: Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect show had a topic that asked: does showbiz make you an asshole or do assholes go into showbiz? How would you have responded?
A: That's a terrible question. I thought he was intelligent. I know a lot of successful people in show business and that's the last word I'd call them. Most people in show business are bright.
Q: How bright were you when you got taken in a Ponzi scheme?
A: Boy, did I. It was my fault for not paying attention. My wife, thinking she was doing me a favor, got me involved in it. A typical stock thing out of Chicago. The guy was my wife's mother's boss. I had my lawyer go to Chicago and check him out, and he seemed very legit. I would send him a chunk of money and two weeks later he'd send me back maybe a third. So it looked like I was making a big profit, but basically all they do is send you back some of your own money. And I lost hundreds of thousands. At the time it was all the money I had. I was a real jerk.
Q: What's your most embarrassing moment?
A: I was at a cocktail party with this actor who always cracks me up and he said something and I pissed myself. I had on a beautiful pale gray suit. I couldn't have had on a black suit, right?
Q: Is your wife your best friend?
A: Definitely.
Q: With her being a casting agent, does she give you any insights about the process?
A: We never talk about it. I know that she works much harder than I do. They don't get paid that much but they're always going to see something, somebody. She's temperamentally that way. If she wasn't doing that she'd be doing something else. I'm lazy physically.
Q: Is laziness the trait you most deplore in yourself?
A: Yes. I can sit in a chair all day and ponder what I'm gonna do, even if it's about going down to the corner for a quart of milk.
Q: What fictional character would you like to be?
A: Ivanhoe.
Q: What sports figure would you like to have been?
A: Joe DiMaggio. There's no bigger hero on Earth, and I don't even know about baseball.
Q: What famous quote would you like to have uttered?
A: Veni, vidi, vici.
Q: What annoys you most?
A: I know definitely what that is: it's that machine that blows leaves around. That should be against the law.
Q: Do you remember your first acid trip?
A: I took it on the night of the New York blackout. I was in an acting class with Raul Julia and Vaughn Meader, the Kennedy imitator, and we were in a small room and the lights started to get brown and we went outside and walked up Seventh Avenue and saw all the lights going out. This guy in our class asked if we wanted to take some acid. So we went to where he lived and I took it. I must say I had a great time. I believe there was a full moon that night, what they call a bomber's moon, and the city was so beautiful. We got in a car and I was doing all that bullshit, "Oh, I can fly."
Q: What was your drug of choice?
A: Vodka. Russian vodka, Polish vodka, Czech vodka. I was a vodka expert. It goes right down, but it's not good for you. And I don't do that anymore.
Q: If you were to receive a letter today from anyone you have known, who would it be from and what would it say?
A: It would be from Ed McMahon and it would tell me that I'd just won a million dollars.
Q: Who would you like to punch in the nose?
A: My dentist.
Q: What is your favorite journey?
A: Going from Katmandu to the Chinese border, a four-hour road trip. Most beautiful scenery I ever saw. I did it right after The Deer Hunter.
Q: How would you behave if someone tried to assault you?
A: I'd cover up. I'm an actor, I can't afford to get hurt.
Q: Ever been robbed?
A: Sure. I was robbed recently of my script of The Prophecy II. I put my bag down at the airport in Venice. It's a very strange story. We were waiting to catch a plane. So the bag was gone--it had my driver's license, credit cards, keys, glasses, a hundred dollars, and the script with three months of notes in it. I saw the guys who took it--one of them asked me for my autograph and I remember giving it thinking, this guy does not collect autographs. I mean, he looked like he'd slit your throat. Anyway, a week later a friend of Julian Schnabel's who lives in Venice whose phone number I had written on the outside of my script calls me and says, "Christopher Walken, I'm a friend of Julian Schnabel's. I have a call from a lady in Sicily who says she found a bag by the side of the road and it's got your stuff in it." She had found it on her way to Sicily in a small town outside of Verona, two hours from Venice. So I got the bag back with the script! All they took was the hundred bucks. Isn't that bizarre?
Q: What is it that you most dislike?
A: I don't like doing anything I don't want to do.
Q: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
A: Being inward-looking. It's possible to be focused on yourself to the point where that's all you see. That's where real depression comes from.
Q: What is your greatest extravagance?
A: Time. And what I do with it. I tend to spend it mostly on myself.
Q: What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A: Happiness is if I have something hard to do at work and on the drive home I think, "Oh man, I nailed that. You are so good!" That's usually not what happens.
Q: What do you consider your greatest achievement?
A: I've been in about 50 movies.
Q: What is your greatest regret?
A: I have nothing that I have to go to a shrink to deal with.
Q: What is your most marked characteristic?
A: I'm very focused.
Q: What or who is the greatest love of your life?
A: My wife. My work.
Q: On what occasion do you lie?
A: I don't.
Q: Do you have a motto?
A: Be comfortable.
Q: How would you like to die?
A: Very old, very successful, working, booked for "Saturday Night Live" for the following weekend.
Q: What would you like posterity to recognize you for?
A: The Nobel Prize for acting.
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Lawrence Grobel interviewed Nicole Kidman for the October '98 issue of Movieline.