CHRISTOPHER WALKEN
Interview by Steven Garbarino
Photographs by Kurt Markus

Mind-blowing in The Deer Hunter, bone-chilling in King of New York, hair-raising in Batman Returns, and, in his upcoming film, True Romance, he’s the “Antichrist” himself. Christopher Walken is the kind of actor who sneaks up on you, points a gun against your head, and says, “So, what’s for dessert?”

Since his breakthrough in The Deer Hunter (1978), Christopher Walken has been making duplicity his norm. While Robert de Niro was the movie’s muscle and John Savage its exposed nerve, Walken was the membrane between them, so taut it seemed he would burst with each spin of the chamber in that infamous game of Russian roulette. The performance won him an Oscar and a reputation for playing eccentric, deeply troubled souls. As the migraine-plagued psychic in The Dead Zone (1983), he was simultaneously vulnerable and intimidating, but his dark half took over completely in the late ‘80s, when he portrayed a series of human monsters that made moral ambiguity look fun. He killed without thought in At Close Range (1986), King of New York (1990), and The Comfort of Strangers (1991). As the Trumped-up industrialist Max Schreck in Batman Returns (1992), Walken hurled Michelle Pfeiffer out of a skyscraper window like he would a cigarette butt. “I feel no remorse ... it’s a terrible thing,” he deadpanned in King of New York. He returns to his screen life of crime this September in a screen-chewing cameo as a Sicilian mobster who meets his match in Denis Hopper in Tony Scott’s True Romance.

I met the actor outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York, a few blocks from his Upper West Side apartment, on a sunny May morning. Dressed in black, Walken emerged like a specter through a shower of pink cherry-blossom petals blowing off the trees: a dapper Boo Radley. For the first thirty minutes of our stroll, which took us through Central Park woods and finally to the foot of Walken’s brownstone, he avoided eye contact and the more probing questions. But with his marvelous face - pale, chiseled, preserved - and Don King haircut, he was recognized by nearly everybody. When a group of five teenagers surrounded him, wanting to know if he was famous, Walken played along, enjoying the attention - yes he was, no he wasn’t.

Final verdict: Walken is human, but not like you and me. “Chris is ordinary in an unordinary way,” says his wife Georgianne, a casting director. “He does things to his own timing. Did I tell you that wild animals are attracted to him?” A few days later, Walken showed up at a downtown studio for the photo session sporting a dark blue suit and a black eye. “Can you believe it?” he said. “I banged it on the corner of a door.” Who would argue with him?

STEVEN GARBARINO: In True Romance, you look as if you’re having a lot of fun playing the “Antichrist”, Vicenzo Cocotti, opposite Dennis Hopper.
CHRISTOPHER WALKEN: The scene has a lot of nice shifts in mood and it surprises you. It’s just like life: people have such shocking reactions to things. It’s funny, and it’s scary too - that’s an interesting combination. There are a number of very good combinations.

SG: What are some others?
CW: Sexy and funny, light and serious.

SG: Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue is amazing in True Romance.
CW: It was like an Elizabethan play, just pages of dialogue. If my theater background comes in handy, it is in handling large chunks of dialogue like that.

SG: The ghost of Elvis Presley (Val Kilmer) makes a guest appearance. I’ve heard you’re a big Elvis fan. I bet you would have liked that role once.
CW: Oh, sure. He was an early inspiration. When I was about fourteen, I met this girl who I was crazy about. Finally, I got up the nerve to ask her to the prom, and she said she would if she didn’t already have a boyfriend. So she took out this picture of this incredibly handsome guy, but there was something funny about it - it wasn’t a photograph, it was cut out of a magazine. I said to her, Why are you insulting my intelligence? She said, it’s this singer, his name is Elvis. Soon after, one started to hear about him being on the Ed Sullivan Show. I loved everything about him.

SG: Does the way you wear your hair have anything to do with him?
CW: Absolutely. The minute I saw and heard Elvis, my haircut changed, and it hasn’t gone back since. Maybe it’s a little shorter, or a little longer, but the suggestion of Elvis is always there.

SG: In True Romance, Christian Slater says that he would fuck Elvis if he was still alive. How about you?
CW: No, I wouldn’t fuck Elvis. There must be something wrong with my libido. But over the last couple of years, in my spare time, I’ve written two plays about Elvis - musings. One of them is called Milk Cow Boogie, after his song, and the other is called Tabloid - it’s based on the stuff you pick up at the supermarket. I eat in a very particular kind of way. I usually get my own food at the local supermarket. And when I’m there, I always pick up all those tabloids. Hardly a week goes by when there isn’t a major thing about Elvis: he’s on Mars, he went to Mexico and had a sex-change operation.

SG: You play a lot of creepy characters and have a way of making evil rather charming.
CW: [Three construction workers stop to say hi to Walken, who winks at them.] I’ve been told I’m good at it. I suppose people enjoy watching people who enjoy their work. There’s no reason to be a professional villain unless you enjoy it.

SG: You started landing the bad-guy roles after the James Bond film A View to a Kill, in 1985.
CW: It may actually have begun as far back as The Deer Hunter. Onscreen, I shot myself in the head playing Russian roulette. The forces of darkness were obviously happening there.

SG: Has being typecast hurt you at all?
CW: I know I’ve been turned down for other kinds of roles: the guy the girl falls for, the guy that makes you laugh. Agents have told me that certain executives have said, “No, he’s not funny,” or, “The thing with the girl isn’t going to work.”

SG: It was pretty funny seeing you in bib overalls, playing a humble farmer and family man from Kansas in the television movie Sarah, Plain and Tall [1991] and its sequel, Skylark [1993]
CW: Glenn Close, who played Sarah, said to me, “Everyone’s going to think you’re gonna murder us all in the end.” [laughs] They’re thinking about making a third one with my evil twin showing up. I could do one of those things where you play both roles.

SG: You wore black when you played Iago here in Central Park in Othello. Do you always wear black?
CW: I wear a lot of black because I think it’s attractive, but also because it looks neat and clean and sensible. Hundreds of millions of Asians wear black - they know what they’re doing. The leather jacket I wore as Iago was something I also wore in a production of Oklahoma!

SG: Tell me something you’ve done lately that would make people think you’re a nice person and not like most of your roles.
CW: I don’t think people think like that. When I walk down the street, people are very open with me. It’s interesting that the New York police are so friendly. They shake my hand, they know I’m from Queen’s. I’ve played a lot of people who do horrendous things, but they obviously don’t think I’m a gangster.

SG: Do you ever scare yourself?
CW: While filming Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers I did. I don’t know if there are people like him, but that was a hard character to be with every day. I was glad when that one was over. I remember sitting in the dressing room outside of Rome, killing time and reading a book, and suddenly I looked up and saw myself in the mirror, and I had exactly the same reaction that I would have if I was in a restaurant and saw somebody I absolutely did not want to see. I looked up and quickly looked away, thinking, I hope he leaves, I hope he didn’t see me.

SG: His sexual tastes were pretty dubious.
CW: He was things you never even thought of.

SG: That’s a paraphrase of a line you say in King of New York. Have you ever done anything that our readers would never even think of?
CW: No, not that they’ve never heard of. I think there are people who are treated so atrociously as children that the mind would boggle if it knew what they’d been through - things you and I would have no experience in, that would make you freak.

SG: Do you ever scare your wife?
CW: I wish my wife was a little more afraid of me, but she’s not. She is more aggressive and outspoken than I am.

SG: I spoke with her the other day - she’s really nice. She said that she stays away from you when you’re playing darker roles.
CW: Yeah, she’s told me that. I don’t really walk around inside the different characters, but it does affect your life.

SG: Are you ever the life of the party?
CW: No, not really. I tend to be a wallflower. The humor comes through in my films. I don’t tend to talk to people much, unless I know them very well. Generally, I don’t say much. But I am funny.

SG: You could offer me a bowl of cornflakes and it would kill me. Do you like to catch people off guard?
CW: Oh, sure. [A woman walking a dog passes the park bench.] You don’t want to go out with a girl who has a big dog, because when you’re together, making it, it will jump all over you.

SG: And they stare at you like they’re jealous. Do you prefer cats?
CW: I have three cats, and two of them have babies all the time. I just gave away a litter, but the mother is already about to have more. She usually has two litters, back-to-back. They’re nice cats. If you want a kitten, call me.

SG: I have a feeling you don’t want to discuss your acting technique.
CW: The last thing good actors talk about is acting. They talk about the great restaurant they went to, the girl they just met. Actors share an unspoken language. They may be going after different angles, but they’re focused on the same thing, which is making the scene work. There are different kinds of energies. My energy is a kind of implosion. I think I’ve always been that way - it’s one of my qualities. The point is that someone with the capacity for implosion also has the capacity to explode.

SG: In The Deer Hunter your character says, “I like to starve myself: it keeps the fear up.” Do you prefer to be on the edge, or at peace?
CW: I much prefer to be peaceful. I think you get more done when you’re quiet inside.

SG: What role of yours has been the closest to who you really are?
CW: I don’t think I’ve ever played a part that was. I don’t think they’d make a movie about somebody like me.

SG: There must be some part of the real you going into the brooding characters you portray.
CW: What you are as an actor is a reflection of what you are in real life, and in a way everything you do in your life is information for your acting. But the truth is that my life is rather alarmingly predictable. I’m a very conservative citizen. I’ve been married for twenty-five years. I have two houses, a station wagon, and cats. I pay all my bills, and people trust me. I was here for this interview right on time.

SG: Tell me what you did when you woke up this morning.
CW: I do the same thing every day. I have coffee and I do my treadmill exercises, and if I have to read something, I find that the morning is very good for that.

SG: I’ve heard you like to keep your private life private.
CW: As far as my reticence - first, a certain amount of modesty is called for, and it is my intention to be an actor until I’m a very old man. If you have that kind of long-term goal, you have to consider holding back a little bit. You don’t want people getting tired of seeing your face or listening to you talking. And the truth is I don’t really have much to say besides whatever my current project is.

SG: You met your wife while performing in West Side Story, right?
CW: We were in a summer stock production and she played my girlfriend. I was Riff, the leader of the Jets.

SG: So you sang that great song. [singing] When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way -
CW: [singing] From your first cigarette -

SG: Till your last dying day -
CW: When you’re a Jet, when the shit hits the fan, you got brothers around, you’re a family man. [laughs] It’s a hard song, because you have to sing it slightly off the beat.

SG: Is your relationship with Georgianne still romantic?
CW: I don’t know if I was ever romantic, but I’m still married.

SG: There were never flowers and candlelit dinners?
CW: I was never like that.

SG: Well, she says that you are, in surprising ways. Like, you’ll call her up out of the blue and ask her to hop on a plane and join you on the set in some exotic locale.
CW: I don’t consider myself like that, but I’m happy she thinks so.

SG: Tell me about your parents.
CW: I feel, under different circumstances, my mother could have gone into showbusiness. She was beautiful and she loved being around theater people. She was the one with the wish for me to be an actor, and I’m grateful - it’s given me a very interesting life. My father was a baker. He’s still very healthy; he lives in Florida. He worked very, very hard. The people he worked with used to roll their eyes because of the voracity with which he would work. I think I inherited that from him, that compulsion. That’s the frustrating thing about being an actor - hiatuses are built in. People seem to think that I work a lot, but it’s not enough for me. So, I write plays about Elvis.

SG: You said you are particular about your diet. I take it you don’t eat a lot of bakery goods.
CW: I eat a lot of fish - and I love garlic.

SG: Have you ever played a vampire? This diet could pose a problem.
CW: No. I don’t know why. I’d be a great vampire. I haven’t been asked. Maybe it’s too obvious.

SG: When I was leaving the office to meet you, my colleagues had the impression that you would be kind of peculiar - they were right.
CW: I’ve always been a little exotic - that’s the truth - but mostly for one basic reason: I’ve been in showbusiness since I was a year old. I grew up with gypsies and singers and dancers running around me - that is the planet I come from. The language I use, the way I express myself, it all comes from there. When I was ten years old, I was working with Jerry Lewis.

SG: Was your strangeness regarded as cool in high school?
CW: Not really. I’ve gotten better as I’ve gotten older, more interesting. I was sort of funny-looking when I was younger. I look better, and I act better. I’m just ... better. I wish I was younger. I turned fifty this year.

SG: You don’t look anywhere near that old. What’s your beauty secret?
CW: My skin has never seen the light of day. And I have a lot of hair - that helps.

SG: I think my hair is starting to recede some.
CW: Anthony Perkins, who I knew as a kid, told me once that every day I should grab my hair and pull it for five minutes. I’ve been doing it since he told me that. They say that men lose their hair because over the years the skin on the scalp tightens, the blood gets cut off, and the hair dies, like grass, so the thing is to keep the scalp loose by pulling on it.

SG: Who could pass up a grooming tip from Anthony Perkins? I’ll give it a whirl. Are you a vain person?
CW: Yeah, sure. One looks in the mirror now to see if everything is there. When I was a kid, it was with more of a critical eye. I must say that I’m glad to be over my early youth because I didn’t get much of a kick out of it.

SG: You really dove into the persona of the drug lord Frank White in Abel Ferrara’s King of New York.
CW: My character was abandoned and left with these black people who took him in and raised him. He had grown up almost like a strange bird. I had two inspirations for that character: one was a French movie about a little boy who was raised by wolves; the other inspiration was a wonderful short story called “Hook,” which is about a hawk that had gotten its wing broken by a farmer. The hawk has to live on the ground for a long time, and the other animals are constantly trying to get at him. But they don’t come too close because they’re still afraid, and they’re not going to come near him until he dies. I thought that’s why the police won’t come near Frank at the end of the film, when he’s dying in the taxicab. They know that while there’s still a spark of life ... I thought there was something very noble about Frank, in spite of how awful he was. Abel and I have a strong understanding of what each other wants; we want the same things. He’s a guy who says, I want to make a movie, and I don’t know what it’s going to be about, but let’s make it anyway.

SG: I’m surprised you like that, being such an orderly person.
CW: I like that chaos very much. We did a lot of that movie right on the spot. It was like, O.K., we got the car and there’s a body in the trunk, what are you gonna say?

SG: You’ve worked with some real screen heavies: Robert de Niro in The Deer Hunter, Sean Penn in At Close Range, Mickey Rourke in Homeboy, and now Dennis Hopper. Do you consider yourself a heavy?
CW: I’m a fragile heavy.

SG: Are you afraid to die?
CW: No. The whole notion of death puzzles me - it always has. I remember as a child standing in front of the open coffin of an uncle who had died. Everybody was tearing their hair out. And I remember thinking, This is impossible, I don’t believe it, it can’t be that you’re just dead. And I still feel that way. Somebody said reincarnation would be good news for us all.

SG: When can I pick up the cat?
CW: Sometime in August. The mother’s name is Eve - the first woman.

SG: Was doing this so bad?
CW: No, it was very pleasant. [Walks up his steps and into his house.]

*****
Transcribed by Carolyn Hinton