The Greats

Christopher Walken

For 25 years, he's gone where other actors didn't dare.   He can be frightening and funny, menacing and majestic, mad, bad, and dangerous to know.   And he sings, too.  

Author: Chris Nashawaty

"I found myself watching each face, each a map of life in flesh."

As the narrator of the new Broadway musical James Joyce's The Dead, Christopher Walken uses this line to describe the emotionally fraught lives of the Irish characters on stage.   But take a few seconds to study the photograph on the opposite page.   Walken's face isn't just "a map of life in flesh"; it's a haunting, full-relief masterpiece that would make Rand McNally both weep with joy and cower in terror.  

Start with the lips.   Occasionally, they'll widen into a smile.   But even then, it's at the most unexpected moments--when nothing particularly funny has been said, when Walken seems to be listening to some sick joke inside his head.   More often, his lips form that chilling scowl you see--the one that curls back to hurl an unscripted gob of spit in Robert De Niro's face near the end of The Deer Hunter.   Now check out the eyes: penetrating, arctic, and slightly dead.  In person, Walken has the thousand-yard stare of a soldier just back from combat; he seems to see right through you.  Finally, there are all those lines that snake between the eyes and the lips.  Those come with age.  But if you look closely, you can make out the few that were etched in the late '70s when Walken was beaten up by a couple of toughs who wouldn't turn down their radio.  One pounded him to the ground while the other hit him with a two-by-four. 

Go back and watch an early film like 1971's The Anderson Tapes, and you'll see a downright pretty kid who started his career as a dancer.  But now, at 56, Walken's weathered face is, more than anything, a map of life in flesh.  It's easy to look at him and assume that he's a variation on the menacing characters he's made famous.  But the fact is, Walken couldn't be more unlike the psychos, crazies, and badasses he plays.  He's just so good at being bad that we think he must be a monster.  He's not.  Christopher Walken is a pussycat who can summon the face of a pit bull. 

I.  THE DANCER--ASTORIA, QUEENS

Knowing what we think we know about Walken from his movies, it's bizarre to consider that he got into show business because of Jerry Lewis.  But posted on the door of his dressing room at the Belasco Theatre is a black-and-white photo of the King of Comedy with his face twisted as if the picture were snapped mid-"Hey, laaaay-dy!"

Walken met Lewis when he was 10.  Growing up in Astoria, Queens, the son of immigrant bakers (his father from Germany, his mother from Scotland), Walken and his two brothers would hop on the subway to Rockefeller Center.  In the early '50s, midtown Manhattan was ground zero for live TV, and he and his brothers would earn extra scratch--and witness celebrities close-up--by performing as extras on shows like Mama and Omnibus.  "They used a lot of kids more or less as furniture," Walken recalls.  One week, Lewis and Dean Martin were guest hosts on The Colgate Comedy Hour.  "I had a scene with Jerry in a penny arcade--there were pinball machines and the things you squeeze and it tells you your passion level--and there was an arm coming out of a wall that you arm-wrestle.  And that was the joke: Jerry arm-wrestled the machine and lost.  I was in that."

Walken was a real ham as a kid.  It's the reason he commuted to the performing-arts-themed Professional Children's School in Manhattan.  "It was a great place," he says, breaking into a mischievous grin.  "It was like 95 percent girls...beautiful girls.  They were all models and stuff.  And the other boys were usually strange--what you might call 'scientific types.' They played the violin and the cello...and I was silly and frivolous.  Those were good days.  What do you call them?  Halcyon days?  Salad days?  It was like that movie where the guy gets stranded on a planet of women."

Walken trained there to be a dancer, not an actor.  And less than a year into his studies at Hofstra University, he dropped out after landing a part in a 1963 Off Broadway musical called Best Foot Forward.  "I just got up and left one day because that's what I wanted," he says.  "It was probably for the best, because I knew I was never going to be a rocket scientist."

Years later, after Walken switched over to theater and film, the choreographer who'd tapped him for Best Foot Forward mentioned his name to Herbert Ross, who was directing the ambitious, surreal 1981 Steve Martin movie musical Pennies From Heaven.  By that time, few in Hollywood knew that the guy who had won an Oscar for 1978's The Deer Hunter was actually a trained song-and-dance man.  And watching Walken's show-stopping tap-dancing striptease to "Let's Misbehave," dressed as a zoot-suited Depression-era hustler, packed a sort of "Who knew?" shock value.  "It was as if you found out De Niro was a chorus dancer," laughs Deer Hunter costar Meryl Streep.  "But Pennies From Heaven--that's closer to the real guy.  I think a lot of what Chris does as an actor comes from dance.  There are very few actors who train as dancers, and he stands like Baryshnikov--with his chest open like a god.  Juxtaposed with his menace and loose-cannon aspect, it just gives him this crazy beauty."

Actually, you can see the dancer in the precise and calculated way Walken moves in his films, the sometimes affected air he brings to even the smallest gestures, and even the way he views sharing scenes with other actors.  Take one of Walken's most memorable performances--1993's True Romance.  In a tender and tense 10-minute tango between two of our ballsiest actors, Walken, playing a suave Mob strongman, interrogates Dennis Hopper.  "I remember we were being interviewed about our scene in True Romance," recalls Hopper, "and Chris said, 'I don't know whether we're great actors or not, but I started out as a dancer and I'll tell you one thing, Hopper and I really partner well together.'"

Sean Penn, a friend of Walken's for more than a decade, calls the True Romance face-off "the best pop-culture scene ever shot....  The hostility buried under the hopelessness of those guys...it's very clear what's going to happen from the beginning, and yet you're tortured in waiting, because both actors draw it out."  Walken likes it too.  "We danced together," he says.  "When actors have that flow, and that rhythm, and that give-and-take, they feel each other like a dancer."

Still, the part of Walken that seems to have been most indelibly affected by his dance training is the unique, baroque rhythm of his speech.  It's almost as if the very idea of acknowledging punctuation would be insulting to him.  Take this infamous bit from Pulp Fiction, where Walken plays a returning POW telling his dead buddy's young son the story behind a gold-plated memento his father wanted him to have: "The way your dad looked at it...this watch was your birthright....  Five long years he hid this watch...up his ass."

"I think that is a definitive sign of a genuine actor," says James Foley, who directed Walken and Penn in 1986's At Close Range.  "To me, a great actor is someone who begins a sentence with no pre-knowledge of where it's going to end.  It's those actors that have it all mapped out who are boring."  Adds Hopper: "The words don't matter to Chris.  He lets them fall where they will.  Sometimes it's amazing, and sometimes, honestly, it sucks."  Hopper laughs.  "Not very often...but sometimes it does--it just sounds awful to me.  You think, 'This doesn't sound real at all, man, wow, where is that coming from?' But he trusts himself...and I really give him credit."

Over the years, Walken's, strange delivery has given Saturday Night Live plenty of fodder.  But Walken still doesn't understand the fuss.  "It's funny, huh?  It doesn't strike me as that unusual, but it's interesting how many people do impressions of me.  I have friends who do me on their answering machines.  I think my rhythm is a bit like someone whose first language isn't English.  I could get away with being a German commandant and not really have to do a lot of accent, because I already sound like I don't speak English that well."

II.  THE ACTOR--BANGKOK, THAILAND

After banging around in obscurity for years on, off, and way off Broadway, in 1976 Walken landed a juicy, if small, part in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, as Diane Keaton's oddball brother Duane.  After Walken confesses to Allen that he often has the impulse to swerve into oncoming traffic and end his life, Allen deadpans, "I have to go now, Duane, because I'm due back on the planet Earth."  Two scenes later Duane is driving a petrified, white-knuckled Allen to the airport. 

"Poor Duane," laughs Walken nearly 25 years later.  "Somebody said that's probably why I started getting all those strange characters--because that was one of the first things I did that was seen by a lot of people.  And here I was playing a suicide case...  I guess one job leads to another.  The next movie I did was The Deer Hunter, and I shoot myself, so it's hard to get cheery parts after that."

The Deer Hunter was Walken's breakthrough, and he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his turn as Nick--an easygoing young steelworker from a blue-collar Pennsylvania town who goes off to Vietnam with his two best friends (De Niro and John Savage) and loses his mind.  "I don't think I've ever learned more in a single experience," says Walken. 

For the movie's Vietnam scenes, the cast and crew spent two months in Thailand.  They began on the snake and rat infested banks of the river Kwai near the border of Burma for the prison-camp scenes.  Then they moved to Bangkok (which doubled as Saigon) for the film's haunting climax, in which Walken has been sucked into an underground nightmare world of Russian roulette played in a sweaty human cockfighting ring where rabid foreigners bet on men pointing loaded guns at their heads.  On screen, it looks like a back alley into hell.  And Walken--at that point subsisting on rice alone to shed pounds--looks like an emaciated, half-mad zombie.  "Those scenes, it really was four in the morning.  It was really hot in that wonderful Southeast Asian way," says Walken, getting almost misty reminiscing about his first guerrilla filmmaking experience.  "That warehouse wasn't a set, it was a rice storage place...and if you wanted to take a nap, you went somewhere and slept on the floor.  It was an amazing time."

Walken, fully aware that the film was his big break, was willing to try anything when the cameras were rolling.  For a scene toward the end of the film when De Niro returns to Saigon and Walken is so far gone he doesn't even recognize him, director Michael Cimino says he told Walken to spit in De Niro's face.  "Bob didn't know it was coming.  And Chris goes, 'You want me to spit in Bob's face?  I can't spit in Bob's face!' But he did it.  Well, Bob almost f---ing...he got so angry he almost got out of the scene.  But he knew it was working.  It's actors like Chris who make scenes like that possible.  He's got great courage."

Cimino adds that things became even more intense when De Niro suggested a little bit of Method acting.  "At one point Bob wanted to put a live round in the gun...just to crank the intensity.  And we had a whole conference about 'Okay, we're gonna do it, but we're gonna check this thing 5,000 times.' We went to a lot of extremes on that film."

It goes without saying that De Niro's loading the pistol was frightening.  But you don't understand just how scared Walken was until you hear him talk about how much he hates guns.  "I don't even like holding them," he says.  "Whenever I hold a gun, I want to get it out of my hand as quick as possible."

Ironic, considering how many of Walken's films have him wielding the damn things.  Take his role as a stylish, hair-trigger capo in Abel Ferrara's seedy 1990 crime-world flick King of New York.  "The first day we were shooting, we did that scene with the Italians around the table," says Ferrara of a scene in which Walken dishes out some point-blank street justice.  "And he says to me, 'I don't like pointing a gun at another actor.' And I was like, 'Oh, man, we've got to shoot a whole movie with guns and you're telling me you don't like pointing a gun at another actor?!' And then we did the scene and Chris shot that guy five times after he was dead; that wasn't in the script! He says he's afraid of guns, and then you say 'Action' and he became--how do you say it?--very efficient."

Walken's most memorable ballistic moment, however, may have been in the bristlingly claustrophobic drama At Close Range, in which he and Sean Penn play father-son thieves.  It was Penn's idea to cast Walken: "It just came over me how unpredictable it would be for me to have someone that surprising in the part."  But Penn was the one with the surprise up his sleeve when director Foley shot the film's climax, in which Penn holds Walken at gunpoint, itching to pull the trigger.  Penn, wanting to give the scene some extra juice, persuaded Walken that the gun was actually loaded.  "The goal is always to break things up and make them more effective," says Penn, "and I guess this was just more dramatic because it was a gun...so the fear on his face is real fear."

Foley believes it was Walken himself who put the fear there.  "I believe Chris allowed himself to not know.  He certainly knew that he could stop and ask.  He allowed himself to have a question without an answer...because Sean's wacko enough.  The main thing is, Chris couldn't be positive--and he didn't want to be.  That's the kind of emotional calculus he uses, while other actors are just doing arithmetic."

You'd think Walken would have kicked the stuffing out of his costar after the director yelled "Cut!" But no.  "[Penn] knew that I was scared of guns, and you can see it in the scene.  It was a blessing.  He did me a favor.  I mean, that's just what good actors do for each other."

III.  THE GREAT--NEW YORK CITY

"This place used to be a variety house and Houdini performed here.  One of his big tricks was making an elephant disappear.  And there's a big elevator under the stage that still works.  It's big enough for an elephant.  That's how he did it."

Christopher Walken is sitting in the empty Belasco Theatre after a recent matinee performance of The Dead.  (The New York Times calls his performance "magnetically low-key.")  He's got a Tupperware bowl of lettuce on his lap and he's using a pair of wooden chopsticks to conduct the quirky beats of his speech as he gives away Houdini's best-kept secrets.  "I suppose I shouldn't be telling you all this...it can't be good luck."

On this stage, in The Dead, Walken doesn't do a lot of dancing, but he does sing.  And listening to him is an otherworldly experience.  It's a bit like watching his tap-dance number in Pennies From Heaven--you just didn't know he could do it.  But Walken actually has a sensitive, mellifluous singing voice.  It's almost the opposite of the swagger he brings to his more harrowing film roles.  And watching him sing, you can see why his wife, Georgianne, an Emmy-winning casting agent for The Sopranos, fell for him when they costarred in a production of West Side Story 30 years ago.  (He played Riff and she played Graziella.) When asked about the rare longevity of their marriage, Walken laughs, "I guess it's not a common thing now."  He credits its success to the example set by his parents, Rosalie and Paul, who have been married 63 years. 

"Chris, in this role, is a revelation to a lot of people," says The Dead's writer-director, Richard Nelson.  "He's a man of great charm, and wit, and grace.  People have seen his movies, and they forget this side of him."

To be precise, Walken has starred in a mind-boggling 70-plus movies.  Everything from the staid Sarah, Plain and Tall trilogy to the cheapie horror Prophecy flicks to doofus comedies like Wayne's World 2.  In fact, he never seems to stop working.  He says it's got nothing to do with seven-figure paydays; he just has his father's work ethic.  "My father--a wonderful man--was very, very hardworking.  But he was also rather spartan in his ways.  I think I inherited some of that.  He was very simple.  I mean, I think if he had a billion dollars, he wouldn't live any differently.  He'd eat the same food and do the same things.  People ask me how I choose what I do, and it's simple--I just take the best thing [that's offered].  I hardly ever like to sit at home.  I don't have any children, I don't have any hobbies, I don't like to travel...I like to work.  I mean, what am I going to do?  Watch Court TV all day?"

Walken knows he's the first guy casting agents think of when they need someone to play creepy.  But what can he do?  After all, he knows he's not a creepy guy in real life: "It's just grown-ups who think I'm creepy," laughs Walken, in a very creepy way.  "But kids don't.  Kids love me."

"I don't get it--there's nothing creepy about him as a person," says Foley.  "It's just one of these accidents of history where some of his biggest successes were a certain type of character.  It's almost like if he wasn't so good at being creepy, he'd get to play fathers, and husbands, and regular guys."

That would be our loss.  After all, Hollywood is crawling with a lot more future Tom Hankses than future Christopher Walkens.  Nice guys are a dime a dozen; but it's impossible to think of anyone other than Walken in The Deer Hunter, or At Close Range, or even in a little-seen drama like The Comfort of Strangers, where as a kinky expatriate, Walken works his part as if it were a piece of saltwater taffy.  Who else could pull off the cartoonishly fiendish Max Shreck in Batman Returns, or the bleach-coiffed Bond villain Max Zorin in A View to a Kill, or even the ink-drooling Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow, who steals the film without a single line?  That's what makes Walken one of our pop-culture Greats.  "He's just magic," says Penn.  "I don't know if I'd want to put a word on what makes him unique...it's just 'Chris.'"

It's an hour or so before Walken has to go back on stage for his second daily performance of The Dead.  And suddenly, after spending most of the afternoon talking about himself, he seems to get a little uncomfortable.  His face--that once impenetrable and foreboding mask of life in flesh--seems somehow softer, warmer, less haunted as you get to know him.  But before he leaves to take his regular preperformance nap, he offers a few final words. 

"Not to be silly, but it's nice when you think about being an actor to think that whatever you do is kind of original.  I think that no matter what I did--if I was a cook, if I was a writer, if I built houses--I would try to make it unique somehow.  Give it a stamp.  Even when I was a kid, I wanted to do things in a way that was unique.  With a little flair, a little style.  So people may say 'I can't stand him,' but at least recognize that what I do is a particular thing.  You know, a wonderful eccentric actor once said to me, 'I always knew I wasn't going to be everybody's cup of tea.' And I just thought, 'That's great!'...  There are people who, I'm definitely not their cup of tea.  But I think that's cooler anyway."

Chris Nashawaty, The Greats: Christopher Walken For 25 years, he's gone where other actors didn't dare.  He can be frightening and funny, menacing and majestic, mad, bad, and dangerous to know.  And he sings, too. 

Entertainment Weekly, 03-17-2000, pp 30+.