Christopher Walken: Playboy Interview

People who know him only from his films usually ask the same question: Is Christopher Walken really as weird as he seems?

They're curious because (a) he looks otherworldly, (b) he speaks in a strange, clipped manner often parodied by comics, (c) he specializes in playing bad guys, often in especially chilling and original ways, and (d) he's been around for as long as anybody can remember but has never quite gotten his due.

So they'd be surprised to see how laid-back Walken is when confronted by a messy situation created by Abel Ferrara, who directed him in King of New York, The Addiction and The Funeral. Ferrara has entered Walken's West Side brownstone apartment on a rainy New York afternoon. Walken suggests the director remove his wet shoes before stepping on the soothing green Chinese rug in the living room. The two men are contrasts in style and manner: Walken is neat, meticulous, groomed, studied; Ferrara is unkempt and anxious. Walken observes the trail of blood Ferrara leaves as he steps from the wooden floor onto the expensive rug. When he points out the blood, Ferrara says he must have stepped on some broken glass on Walken's floor. Walken is incredulous. His home is so spotlessly clean you could eat off his floor without finding a piece of lint, let alone a shard of glass.

"He must have cut his foot before he came," Walken explains to his wife, Georgianne, after Ferrara leaves. "His sock was all bloody."

"I'll send the rug out," Georgianne says, "but you know how tough it is to remove bloodstains."

"So we'll be able to point out that this is where Abel Ferrara bled for his art," Walken says, laughing.

In his kitchen he starts cutting up brussels sprouts to relax. When he's done he wipes already spotless counters with a cotton dish towel. "I can't stand mess," he admits.

His face is beginning to wrinkle. Bags are forming below his eyes. Walken is thin, 175 pounds on a six-foot frame. When he talks he pokes at his hairline with his fingertips in some strange ritual that has something to do with either stimulating the roots or tapping his brain for inspiration. He also briskly strokes his cheeks and neck with the backs of his fingernails as if trying to scrape away any loose skin. When he's not wiping counters and tables clean, he's constantly using his hands to play with his face. But there is something else about this unique actor, whose face has sent chills down the spines of audiences. He is very funny, with a droll sense of humor. He also has a great, inhaling laugh. When he tells a story and it has a punch line, he tells it with gusto. And then he laughs. This aspect of Walken comes as a surprise, because his public image is of a man who might be crippled from the neck down, as he is in Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, but who can still force Andy Garcia onto his knees in quivering fear. He may not be able to unzip his own pants, but he's perfectly capable of instructing one of his movie goons to do that for him, and then take out his dick so the guy he's tormenting can suck it. That's the Chris Walken we've grown to love. As a "Los Angeles Times" reviewer observed, Walken "can embody pure, scary evil better than just about anybody." And "Film Comment" noted that if there is such a thing as menacing vulnerability, Walken has personified it: "He understands scary-funny better than anyone.

He has been influenced by show business his entire life, so much so that he marks time by what was playing in theaters, who was on TV, what he was doing at the time of a star's death (when James Dean died, Walken was at a roller-skating rink in Queens). He was born, he points out, on the opening night of Oklahoma!—March 31, 1943. His father was a baker, his mom a woman so enamored with show business that she pushed her three sons into crossing from Queens into Manhattan to study at the Professional Children's School, then took them on stage and television auditions. The brothers learned to dance, to playact and to stand behind Milton Berle or Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis or Jackie Gleason whenever some kids were needed as background for a TV skit. "Those guys were kings," Walken recalls fondly. "They were big stars and they were treated that way."

Until he danced for a nightclub singer named Monique Van Vooren, Walken went by his given first name, Ronald. But that changed after he told the chanteuse he didn't like the sound of it. "She tried out some other names on me. One night she called me Christopher and I kept it." His first dramatic role was as the king of France in a Broadway production of The Lion in Winter. He was almost fired for having the shakes, but he somehow managed to calm down enough to keep the job. Other plays followed, and Walken honed his talent doing everything from Shakespeare to David Rabe. Actors still talk of how he crawled on his elbows like a crab in Caligula or how he played Stanley Kowalski for laughs in A Streetcar Named Desire because he didn't want his performance to be compared with Marlon Brando's. "It was a stitch," he says, "but a lot of people criticized me for doing that. But what the fuck was I supposed to do? I never was Stanley to begin with." The movies came somewhat late for him—he was 26 when he got a bit part in a film called Me and My Brother. He followed that two years later, in 1971, with The Anderson Tapes. It took five more years before he landed a role in Paul Mazursky's Next Stop, Greenwich Village. Then came "The Sentinel" and "Roseland" before Woody Allen cast him as Diane Keaton's demented brother in "Annie Hall." But it was Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter that made Walken a star—he landed an Oscar for best supporting actor for his portrayal of a battle-scarred Vietnam soldier. The first real money Walken made as a movie actor was for The Dogs of War, in which he played a mercenary attempting to oust a dictatorial government. In 1983 came Brainstorm, a film remembered because its star, Natalie Wood, fell off a yacht and drowned one evening while her husband, Robert Wagner, and Walken sat in an onboard room. For years reporters have tried to get Walken to talk in detail about the event. Until now he has refused.

After Brainstorm came more movies: The Dead Zone, based on Stephen King's novel, the James Bond film A View to a Kill, At Close Range, Biloxi Blues, The Milagro Beanfield War, Homeboy, Communion, King of New York, The Comfort of Strangers and McBain. He was a villainous tycoon in Batman Returns and the evil movie producer in Wayne's World 2. His scene with Dennis Hopper in True Romance took that movie to another level. Walken also appeared in Pulp Fiction. His latest film is Excess Baggage, with Alicia Silverstone.

He's been married to casting director Georgianne Thon for 28 years. They have a house in Wilton, Connecticut as well as the apartment in Manhattan. When he's not working (which is rare), Walken likes to cook, paint and observe his cats.

We sent Contributing Editor Lawrence Grobel (whose last interview for us was with author Saul Bellow) to find out what makes Christopher Walken tick. Grobel reports:

"Walken is most comfortable standing in the kitchen, peeling vegetables and cooking meals. We stood in the kitchen of his rented house in Los Angeles for three hours at a time over five days, debating whether or not his behavior was obsessive (I said it was; he didn't think so). In his apartment in New York I finally got to sit on a couch in his living room, where we shared a bottle of red wine and went over his latest appearance on Saturday Night Live.

"In a moment of clarity he marveled that when he turned 53 he celebrated his half a century in show business, a claim few actors in the world can make. He still worries when he completes a project and doesn't have the next one lined up, and he compared his career to a roller coaster. 'I've come and gone a number of times,' he said. 'It's not that I went away, but I became much less visible. Then I do something and I'm back.'

"He's so funny and such a natural storyteller that it's sometimes easy to forget that he makes his living playing some of the most chilling characters known to movies."