Walken Talks

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The ageless face and ice cold demeanour single out Christopher Walken.  He began his career as a dancer, won an Oscar for his role in The Deer Hunter and will soon be seen as the next Bond villain.  "I'm not a natural actor," he says.  You have to agree...

Profile:  Neil Norman
Photo:  Derek Ridgers

THE FIRST THING THAT strikes you is the face.  Broad and flat with Mongolian hooded eyes and coloured white, dead white.  The high forehead is topped with an aggressive peroxide thatch bleached for his role as the latest Bond villain.  The effect is as if the experience of stumbling through The Dead Zone as Stephen King’s crippled seer has turned his hair white.

The second thing that strikes you is the laugh.

An unearthly, rasping wheeze, it resembles nothing so much as Mutley’s malevolent hacksaw hiss after he has chomped Dastardly Dick for the umpteenth time. 

Truth to tell, it is rather extraordinary to be greeted by this tall angular figure with a lean surfboard and a face that looks like it has just crawled from under a stone.  And even more extraordinary to find the combination so devilishly attractive.  But Christopher Walken is a one-off.  There isn’t another actor around who even remotely resembles him.

Looking at the ageless face, it comes as a shock to realize the he had turned 35 by the time he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Nick in The Deer Hunter, the film which undoubtedly plucked him from obscurity, and forever etched the memory of his mad grin as he held a paranoid gun to his own head. 

AN OVERNIGHT SUCCESS he was not.  Walken has been in the business since the age of ten.  He began as a dancer and still considers himself first and foremost "an entertainer”.  Since his screen debut in The Anderson Tapes in 1971, however, he has chiseled a canyon of screen characters that teeter between unlikely heroes and smiling villains.

Currently, he is enjoying the traditional success of many actors in his position – that of playing James Bond’s chief adversary.  Reserved for unusual actors or those adept at playing suave non-heroes, the Bond villain is to actors like Walken what the pantomime dame is to Larry Grayson:  money for old rope.

Not that one begrudges him the role of Max Zorin in A View to a Kill, fourteen in the canon of ‘official’ Bond movies.   He has worked hard enough in a number of films that have had as difficult a time at the hands of the critics as they went on to have at the box office.  A response that largely overlooked Walken’s contribution to Heaven’s Gate, Pennies From Heaven and even The Dogs of War.

"I was a showboy and a tapdancer basically,” he says of his early career, as we sit in his rented Kensington flat on a grey November day.  He is polite and nervous, his hands constantly on the move, circling themselves, twisting, twitching.  He gives few interviews and is reputedly difficult about being photographed.  Large glasses of white wine are liberally quaffed and slowly the atmosphere eases into something like geniality.

He is not, he claims, as paranoid about interviews as he has been made out to be.  "I feel about interviews the way I feel about music; that if you take a good piece of music and play it badly it looks like a bad piece of music.”  Nevertheless, his reluctance to do interviews has led to the suspicion that he is a man who does not like to talk.  Or that there are things he does not like to talk about.

HE BEGAN AS A DANCER, filling out the chorus lines in touring musicals like West Side Story.  It was while he was in the chorus of an ill-fated musical about Sherlock Holmes called Baker Street that a producer asked him to read for the part of the king of France in the original Broadway production of The Lion in Winter.  Having got the part he was so scared that every night he would spill the contents of his goblet of wine all over the stage and narrowly avoided being fired.

But that was to lead to his first Romeo at Stratford, Ontario.  "I’d never even read Shakespeare and I must say that was a disaster.  I never knew why I got the job but I always suspected it was because I’d done a part where I wore tights.”

He has since had two more stabs at Romeo.  "The second time I was better and the third time I was pretty good.” Having walked out of college after less than a year he decided to go back to studying for a couple of years – out of the "humiliation and defeat” of Romeo number one.  "When I did that I absolutely did not know my ass from my elbow!”

As a result, he is now almost obsessive about The Bard and has played many of the major characters with varying degrees of success.  "I remember I played Richard II once and people came backstage and they would say, ‘Loved your Hamlet’.”  He emits that distinctive laugh and then suggests that Richard III, which he has yet to play, would probably suit him best.  "I don’t think I would have to act much if I played Richard III.”  Rasp, Rasp, Rasp.

THE CONVERSATION GOT around to Richard III by a circuitous route.  I had begun telling him how much I had enjoyed The Dead Zone, nominating his performance as the haunted teacher blessed with the curse of second sight as his best yet.  His reply, challengingly self-mocking, is typical of his attitude to his work.  "Yeah.  You see now, that’s one of the latest ones.  It’s coming along.”

For an actor with his experience (he had made at least seven films before The Deer Hunter) it is surprising to hear him talk so modestly about himself in relation to his art.  It’s almost as though he had just started making films and was feeling his way step by step.  Take the matter of the smile, for example.  Something that he does often and quite naturally when talking to me but rarely on film.  Brainstorm being a notable and embarrassing exception.

"I’m learning to smile,” he says, "It’s a thing you have to learn how to do.  I’ve smiled on stage for years.  It’s a technique of being comfortable in front of a camera.  Some people just have it immediately.  I wish I was one of those but I never was.  I’m not a natural actor.”

This is clearly an area that concerns him because he takes time to explain precisely what he means, building up a impressionistic collage of phrases to define his meaning..."When you’re not comfortable, if you’re smart – it’s like an animal – you try to stay still. If you feel you’re in danger, you freeze.  That’s what I did for a long time in films.  I didn’t understand what was happening.  And I thought, ‘Well, you don’t know what you’re doing – don’t do anything’ – which got me through a lot of times.  But still it’s not enough.  I know that.”

Ironically, it probably is enough for the many Walken fans who find him one of the most enigmatic performers around.  Loosening up on screen might literally crack the image.  Not that Walken underestimates himself to the point of self-effacement.  Despite a memory of sitting in the Beverly Hotel coffee shop after the first day’s shooting of Pennies From Heavenwondering what someone like him "with absolutely no talent" was doing in the profession, he pulled himself together enough to start enjoying making films. "You have to.  You have to figure out how to enjoy it otherwise there is no reason to be there.”

And having got this far how does he assess his strengths and weaknesses?

"I think my strength… it’s my only strength.  It’s the only thing I have.  I know I’m original.  And sometimes it’s not good and sometimes it’s very good.  But I know I have that.  Weaknesses are all around.  God.  You name it.  I recognize a certain kind of vanity which I’ve dropped because it’s so stupid.  It has nothing to do with what people generally think of as vanity…a sort of narcissism.  It’s a vanity of pride… of not entering into something because one thinks one doesn’t need it.  I really like the idea of doing everything I can.  What Blake called, ‘The wisdom in extremes’.”

Walken is fond of quotes.  There’s another one coming right up...

"But it’s a fine balance because you have to protect your talent.  That’s the trick I suppose. What somebody has called, ‘Building the bridge between the monk and the beast’.  Isn’t that a good line?”

He smiles, almost smug, when I agree.

"Graham Greene.”

THIS SEASON'S OFF - BROADWAY hit has obviously been Hurlyburly, David Rabe’s play in which Walken played a coked-out TV casting director opposite Sigourney Weaver and William Hurt.  Despite the evident success of the production, no doubt aided by the weight of the cast, Walken was the first to leave, to assume the mantle of Max Zorin in A View to a Kill.

If the play should come to London he says he would be happy to resume his role among the original cast members.  He left before any of the others because, "after four months I always start to get ants in my pants.”

The ants have taken him from his earliest stage appearance with a sixteen-year-old called Liza Minelli in Best Foot Forward, through West Side Story (where he met is wife of 19 years, Georgianne), The Lion in Winter, The Anderson Tapes, Next Stop Greenwich Village and Annie Hall and into the more familiar Walken vehicles.

THE TIME HAS come for some snapshots.  Having been relaxed and eloquent, he now becomes stiffer, freezing over as Derek suggests one or two postures.   Walken is – amazingly for an actor – uncomfortable in front of the camera.  He wants to know if he can keep talking so I ask him one or two general things about his background. 

He talks about gong to Glasgow to visit his relations (his mother is Scottish, his father German).  I feel very Scottish,” he says.  "I feel vestigial about it.  I feel like a clansman.  Tribal and warlike.”

I ask him about the time he was picked up by Noel Coward and that laugh returns in full wheeze.

"Well, he didn’t pick me up.  He PICKED ME OUT (Rasp, Rasp).  I worked for him in what I believe was the last show he did.  A musical version of his play Blithe Spirit called High Spirits.  Over twenty years ago.”

Everyone who has ever met The Master has a story to tell about him.  Walken is no exception.

"It was the first day of rehearsal and he came and introduced himself to everyone.  He was an extremely gracious man to everybody.  He got to me and I was in my dancing clothes and I had on a fire engine red T-shirt.  We shook hands and he said, ‘Interesting shirt’.  I was petrified.  I said to him, ‘Why, yes.  It’s...it’s RED!’ (Rasp, Rasp) And he said, ‘Well. It’s been an exciting day for us all.’ (Rasp)”

I TALKED TO WALKEN ON November 29.  The last Thursday in November is a special day for Americans.  Thanksgiving Day.  Turkey, cranberry sauce and for Walken, three years ago, tragedy.  In his thirty-odd years in the business, Walken has managed to lead, in public, at least, a reasonably blameless life.

"It’s not ordinary but very regular.  I go to bed early and I have a very nice life.  My wife is upstairs and…you know, I’ve been that way for a long time.

But three years ago on November 29 Natalie Wood drowned during a party on a boat which contained her husband Robert Wagner and Walken.  The incident gave rise to much speculation as to the relationship between Walken and Wood, who had just finished filming Brainstorm, and the recipe propounded by the press held all the ingredients of a spicy scandal.  Sex, drugs and death – stuff that has filled the movie cookbooks from Hollywood Babylon to Wired.

Walken has remained reluctant to talk about the events of that night despite intense pressure to do so, especially after the publication of a book by Lana Wood, Natalie’s sister, which made certain claims about the Wagner / Walken / Wood ménage that were far from savoury.  What did he have to say about it now?

"Everything that is known about what happened has been published. I don’t know what happened.”

Defenses intact.

And yet he seems willing to talk some more...

"It was just an accident and a tragedy and it happened in private, in solitude for whatever reason – a dark, wet night, a couple of drinks; doing whatever you’re doing... trying to hook up something to the side of the boat or whatever... falling on your ass in the water... I don’t know. My silence about it has simply been the silence of ignorance.”

He maintains he still hasn’t read Lana Wood’s book.

"It doesn’t sound kosher to me.  You know the curious thing about this is, certainly not to diminish it, I see things like that every day in the newspaper… every day.  Somebody fell in their bathtub…somebody pulled out of a driveway…somebody ate a poisoned Mars bar.  Who the hell knows?  But these things happen constantly and I think when it happens to somebody famous it’s a different story.

"We were all having a great weekend. We were at the end of a picture having finished our work and what were we going to do for the next two weeks?  It was exactly three years ago today that we left. The weather wasn’t very good. We went off for a nice weekend, having a very, very good time and I might add we were not the only people having a good time.

It always sounds like we were all alone out on the high seas. We were actually fifty feet off the shore Catalina in a harbor with many, many boats around us. The weather was shitty. Everybody was locked inside. There was a sort of cold drizzle. We were partying, there’s no question about it, but very conservatively. Too much to drink. Who knows? In fact I was asleep when it all happened."

The perfect alibi.  Out for the count.  He tells the story and the laugh has long since gone.

"The fact is when somebody dies it’s a very serious thing. No matter who dies, death gets your attention. You can pass out all you like. You can party. You can do all kinds of things…”

 He smiles.  Kind of.

"...But don’t die."