After years of screen violence, Christopher Walken is dying for a change. But will he ever get to play the good guy? Richard Mowe meets Hollywood’s favourite psycho and finds out why he’s got Scotland in his sights.


"I have a friend who complains he has never been allowed to die in a movie.  I die all the time," smiles Christopher Walken.  With pale, bulging blue eyes and the kind of cheekbones you could sharpen an axe on, the cadaverous actor almost always plays the villain.  In over 50 movies he’s run the gamut from bizarre (Pulp Fiction) to beheaded (Sleepy Hollow), from disturbed (The Deer Hunter) to deranged (Wildside).

After so much cinematic darkness, it’s somehow satisfying to find that Christopher Walken really does shun the sun.  When we meet on a bright day at the Deauville film festival in Normandy, the actor hides his ghostly pallor in a shady corner, shielding his eyes with a pair of dark glasses.  In fact, it is only when he hears my accent that his face lights up.  "You know, a whole part of my family live in Glasgow," he says, breaking out into what could pass for a smile.  "It’s a beautiful city - and fascinating culturally.  I would love to play theatre there, but there are union problems which make it difficult.  I could happily live in Scotland, though.   My mother lived in Glasgow until she grew up and moved to New York but a lot of my relations are still there, mainly shipyard workers.  They are all interesting... characters," he says.

On screen, of course, Walken’s characters share a certain, um, family resemblance.   Whether it’s The Man with the Plan in Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead or Caesar the Exterminator in Mouse Hunt, there’s a steely, blank-eyed homicidal rage seething just below the surface.  Doesn’t he ever get bored of playing the psycho? "I’m very happy to be working, and if that means I’m the villain, then fine," he says, resigned to such typecasting.

But there have been brief flirtations with less terrifying roles.  "Not many people know this, but I was also tested for the Ryan O’Neal role in Love Story," he confides.  The romantic lead he did land, in the comedy A Business Affair, was not a success, and he got poor reviews when he played Romeo "because everything I said sounded sarcastic," he says, sounding sarcastic.

"Movies are expensive to make, so they hire people they know can do something effectively," he explains.  "They take the leading romantic actor, the comic actor, the action guy and the villain.  Drama is contained in basic characters. You are the memories the audience has of you, but the trick is to use that and be a bit surprising."

Off-screen, the 58-year-old actor is less keen on surprises.  He and his wife Georgianne Thon, a casting agent, have been married for 35 years.  "I met my wife in a touring production of West Side Story," he recalls.  "She played my girlfriend."  They appeared in several plays together, but by the time he broke into the film industry, Georgianne had given up acting to become a casting agent.   "She hasn’t got me a single role in all this time.  If I hadn’t been working so much, I might have developed a complex," he deadpans.

They don’t have any children or pets, because Walken doesn’t like them, and they live on a small farm in upstate New York.  Apart from cooking (there was once a rumour he might have his own celebrity chef show but it never materialised; Walken wielding knives might have frightened the children), he claims to have no hobbies.

What? No Russian roulette? No pulling the wings off flies? "My life is very conservative.  I live very quietly," he explains patiently, and clearly not for the first time.  "Working is what gets me up in the morning.  If I’m not working for two weeks I get very disorientated and I don’t know what I’m doing.  I follow the same routine every day.  I get up, exercise and learn my script.  I eat the same things at the same time… no, I’m serious.  I don’t like the unknown or the unexpected.  I get very upset if my bills aren’t paid immediately."

The bills have been paid more or less consistently since Walken was 10, and already a veteran of live television.  He started off doing comedy with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, but his progress to fully fledged actor came by chance after a producer suggested he play one of Henry II’s sons in the 1968 film The Lion in Winter.  By the late ’70s, the gangly actor was busily making his name in a series of knockout supporting roles.  He stole the show as Diane Keaton’s psychotic sibling in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and again as the suicidal Vietnam veteran Nick in The Deer Hunter (for which he received a best supporting Oscar) the following year.  The Russian roulette scenes with Robert De Niro and John Savage were memorably chilling, but it was his performance in Annie Hall which sowed the seeds of his dark reputation.  "When I did Annie Hall for Woody, that was the first time I heard the words ‘scary’ or ‘weird’," he says.  "That’s what he wanted from me and that’s what I gave him."

Before that, there had been several years as a song-and-dance hoofer in musicals, performing on Broadway and going on the road with shows such as West Side Story.   "Until I was 25 that was pretty much what I did - dancing, mainly tap, as well as stints on Saturday Night Live," he admits, explaining his trademark penchant for showing a bit of fancy footwork in his films - and his MTV award-winning performance in Fatboy Slim’s recent music video, Weapon of Choice.

Dancing is obviously still a large part of Walken’s life and even when he’s not on camera, he compares the dynamic between two actors to dancing.  He says he likes to relax by watching old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals and confides that "when Dennis Hopper and I had that scene together in True Romance, it was just like Fred and Ginger.  We knew our lines, but then he started to make me laugh, and I made him laugh, and it all got hysterical.  Then I shot him in the head."

Along with his two brothers, Walken was raised by his mother, Rosalie, and father, Paul, a German, in New York.  Originally christened Ronald (because his mother was crazy about the actor Ronald Coleman), when he wasn’t at school or acting he would help out in the family bakery, doing odd jobs and deliveries.

Loyal to his roots, Walken says he still feels very much part of New York society.   He has an extended network of family and friends in the city, both inside and outside the business.  He often watches the big fights at Madison Square Garden and it’s not unusual for him to find himself filming on the streets he knows so well.   Last year he shot the independent heist film The Opportunists in Queens, the neighbourhood of his youth and, when he was making Abel Ferrara’s King of New York, playing a ruthless cocaine dealer, he would pass the hospital where he was born every day.  

More recently, Walken has broken away from New York - and bad guys.  He has appeared in a stage version of Chekhov’s The Seagull, voiced a falcon in the forthcoming Stuart Little 2, completed an upcoming family drama for Disney about bears and was recently in Australia coping with kangaroos in a children’s film, Down Under.

His next significant appearance, however, will be as neurotic film director Hal Weidmann in America’s Sweethearts, a behind-the-scenes comedy with a contemporary Hollywood backdrop.  It also features Julia Roberts, Billy Crystal, Catherine Zeta Jones and John Cusack, with Walken’s character holding his film hostage from the ministrations of the studio.  "Hal’s an interesting guy - an innovator," he enthuses.  "I think it’s very funny.  I’ve never met anyone like that in Hollywood, though.  Sorry to disappoint you."

Walken is known for his obsession with work.  As a gun for hire he welcomes most jobs that come his way, but his personal tastes lie in the independent sector.  "That’s because the crews tend to be small, there are fewer distractions, and most of the time you don’t have much money so you have to make them quickly," he says.   "For me that means a five- or six-week stint at the most, whereas if I become involved in a big studio project I can be tied up for five or six months."

The shooting for one of these films may take relatively little time compared with a Hollywood blockbuster, but the preparation is the same for every part Walken has ever played.  In fact, he puts his unnerving screen persona down to a meticulous approach to the script.  "I’ve always been a character actor, although I’m not quite sure what that means," he says.  "All my scripts are absolutely covered in notes, so any time I say anything - even ‘pass the salt’ - I have six subtexts, comments on what I really mean when I’m saying that.  Maybe that’s what gives the impression that I’m saying one thing and thinking something else."

So what has tempted him back into the limelight this time? He shrugs.   "Sometimes you make a big movie, sometimes a little one, and sometimes you do a TV show.  Sometimes you just stay home."

And that’s when Christopher Walken suffers the jitters rather than inspiring them in others.  When he was younger he used to experience very bad stage-fright, a fear that he conquered by confronting his demons and going back on stage.  "As a rule I wouldn’t recommend it," he says of that approach.  "When I was a boy we went on the principle that if you couldn’t swim you would be thrown into the deep end to make the best of it.  I was thrown into the pool and they had to fish me out - and still I cannot swim. 

"With stage-fright you keep on doing it and eventually the fear goes away.  If you stick around long enough you become very hard to intimidate.  It is very difficult to make me nervous about working.  There have been so many times when I thought I was finished, but it wasn’t true.  You just keep going.  I am scared of sickness, pollution and crazy people.  But work-wise there is nothing that frightens me."

Perhaps understandably, Walken hankers after a certain normality in his catalogue of weirdos, psychos and villains.  As if the prince of darkness would welcome just a chink of light.  He’s probably joking when he suggests, wistfully, that "perhaps for a change it would be fun to play someone very ordinary - a father with a family and a job, and a house and a dog.  Do you remember those Fred McMurray films? He always seemed to have a pipe and slippers and his wife was making dinner.  Some day, maybe, I’ll play that part."  Dream on.

America’s Sweethearts is released on 19 October.

"When I was a boy we went on the principle that if you couldn’t swim you would be thrown in the deep end to make the best of it.  I was thrown into the pool and they had to fish me out - and still I cannot swim"