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Christopher Walken is unarguably an enigma. His piercing eyes, his crazy hair, and his even crazier career choices have made him one of Hollywood’s most intriguing identities. Time has made Walken no less an oddball, and Empire discovers a conversation with the man can take some very strange twists and turns, starting with his love of dancing. “I consider Pennies From Heaven, the musical, as a turning point in my career. I’m very happy to have done that because it was the last musical made by MGM. I remember I dubbed my taps on the same little parquetry floor that Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor – all those people – used.” Adding to the impression that he is actually happiest when dancing, Walken speaks fondly of the recent Fatboy Slim music video he starred in, Weapon of Choice. “It was very unexpected at my age to be in a music video. I heard the tune, it was very catchy. Spike Jonze called. I’ve done a couple of musical movies and when I was young I was a dancer in shows. I guess Spike knew about that. It was very quick to shoot. We shot it all in one night in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles.” Walken gives the impression that he is only doing what makes him happy. These days, when he’s not dancing, he’s directing, having just completed his directorial debut, Popcorn Shrimp, a short film starring the original Karate Kid, Ralph Macchio. “Showtime made a whole series of little five-minute pieces. They called me up and asked me if I wanted to participate. |
I went into the next room and wrote this thing in a couple of hours. A small script. I don’t know what it was. Six or seven pages. I more or less handed it to the people and said, ‘You take care of it,’ and they got all these nice actors. Then we shot it in six or seven hours. I must say, it was done so quickly that I just said ‘Do whatever you want.’ I enjoy it when directors say that to me.” In typically quirky style, his long-term dream project is a biopic on the life and times of well-endowed porn star John Holmes, although the long struggle to get people interested seems to have worn away at his enthusiasm for that somewhat strange project. “I’ve done a number of scripts. It’s sort of my hobby. When I’m not working, I sit around and I write these things. I spent a couple of years trying to get the John Holmes script made. Let’s face it though, getting a movie made is a miracle, I don’t know how people do it. I had a lot of lunches and a lot of people say they were enthusiastic but nothing ever happened. When I first got interested in it, he [Holmes] had recently died. There was a big article in one of the Sunday papers about him and I just thought it was an interesting story: the idea of a gift being a curse.” He punctuates this with his trademark crackling chuckle. But aside from the extracurricular projects – the most bizarre of which is, wait for it, a cooking show that he’s put together with his close friend Julian Schnabel (“We just went out with some video cameras and made a three-part thing. We bought the food, then we cooked it, then we ate it.
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We had about nine hours of video which we pared down to half an hour. It was sort of amusing.”) – Walken’s acting is an area of his life which shows no sign of slowing. "I consider Pennies From Heaven a career turning point." With a slew of sinister psycho roles under his belt as well as coming up in films like The Affair Of The Necklace, Down And Under (in which he plays a Mafia henchman chasing a kangaroo with a pouch full of money) and Gigli, the question has to be raised: does he ever wish he was offered the odd hero role, or even a romantic lead? “I don’t know. I asked a romantic hero actor once – a wonderful actor – who always gets the girl. I asked him if he ever played villains. He said, ‘they never ask me.’ He’d said he’d love to but they never ask. I guess I could say the same. Movies are expensive to make and if it works playing the funny guy or the villain or the action hero, chances are you’ll be asked to do that again. It’s just kind of a practical business kind of thing. I think that happens.” By William Thomas Click on thumbnail to enlarge
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