The interview’s over and I’m taking the lift down to the hotel lobby with Chrsitopher Walken. It’s the kind of place tha pipes muzak into the lift. As the smoothly anodyne beats and strings swirl around, I glance at Walken. Althoug we were chatting away before getting into the lift, he has now assumed a position.
Strikinlgy drawn, dressed in thight black T-shirt, grey pants and battered suede shoes, he’s staring off into the distance, his eyes receding into his pale visage, his mouth a tight pout, his hair slicked back. There’s a slight twitch at the side of his mouth. As I watch him, the muzak seems to get whinier, more eerie by the second, as if it’s been knocked a semi-tone off key. I can’t stand it any more. I blurt out some ambient chatter about muzak. Walken comes to and grins. As we leave the lift, he leans over and purrs: „They can be quite frightening things, elevators."
It’s a Christopher Walken moment. Actually I’m quite relieved one has finally happened. Prior to that, Walken had been chatty and charming. He’d goofed around. He’d taken the piss. He’d told jokes. He’d been a little odd around the edges, but no the intense wacko his performances (and press) might lead you to expect. Since he made his name (and picked an Oscar) with his portrayal of the lost Viet vet Nick in The Deerhunter, he’s made wounded, scary visionaries his speciality.
In films like David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone, James Foley’s At Close Range, Abel Ferrara’s King of New York and Paul Shrader’s The Comfort of Strangers, he’s established himself as the eeriest screen presence of his generation, the King of the Creeps, the Duke of Spook. He’s played people cut off from the mainstream, people who’ve seen too much to ever find their way back to normality, dangerously loose cannons, damaged individuals with the capacity to inflict damage, and he’s done it so effectively that people have assumed that he must be like that off screen.
Certainly, he looks the part. When you compare his stretched, haunted face to photos from his twenties (when he was possessed of vaguely Robert Redford-ish good looks), you can't help but think that he must have been through something fairly heavy. However, at 10 o'clock on a Monday morning, after getting up early to drive in from his home in Connecticut, he isn't about to start delving into his dark past, if indeed one does exist, or the roots of his weirdness. Which is not such a bad thing.
The fascination of his performances has to do with the way he holds things back, with the way his various twitches and hesitations hint at something without ever revealing exactly what it might be. It's a fascination which spills over into his real life. if he actually confessed to a monster coke habit, say, he wouldn't be half so interesting. It's much better to be left to wonder, to be drawn in by those cold, reptilian eyes.
Actually there have been signs that Walken has been looking to distance himself from his creepy persona. Perhaps the spectral hood Frank White in King Of New York and the murderously shifty costmopolitan Robert in The Comfort Of Strangers took things just about as far as they could go. Certainly, in Wayne's World 2, Batman Returns and even True Romance, he's been cruising, turning in Duke of Spook comic turns. He's also said he wants to play romantic leads, one reason why he's turned up in Charlotte Brandstrom's A Business Affair, one of those spectacularly bad films which actually outnumber the good stuff in the Walken CV.
He plays Vanny, a pushy New York publisher who tries to shake up the London books world, falls for the wife of his star author, but can't handle it when she begins a writing career of her own. It really is difficult to figure what Walken saw in the script. Perhaps he just fancied spending a few weeks in London. Perplexingly, throughout the interview he seems unaware (or unwilling to acknowledge) what a turkey the film is.

What attracted you to A Business Affair? The character of Vanny, this New Yorker trying to make it in publishing in London, a tough businessman but also naive about women. I thought it was a good part, a big part, a nice sympathetic character in a way, and also it was something to do with a woman which I don't usually get.

Why do you think that is? I don't know. I just usually play villains. Movies are so expensive to make that if you do something and you're effective, you tend to get hired for the same thing, just because the producer knows what they're buying. With me they know they're buying somebody who can effec tively play villainous, psychologically disturbed, damaged types.

Why do you think you get these parts? Did your performance in The Deerhunter define you for people? I guess it started a ball rolling. Shooting yourself in the head, committing suicide on screen, you don't see too much of that. But I think people equate strangeness with menace or danger. I'm definitely strange, but I'm definitely not dangerous. It's like a xenophobic thing. Someone once said to me, you're a foreign actor. That's how I feel.

How come? I was born into showbusiness. I was a child performer with my brothers. I was raised that way. I had an idiosyncratic, eccentric upbringing. I'm not sorry about it, but I was very different from other people. I was a show kid and I think it shows. I think it'll be with me till I die.

Abel Ferrara says that he didn't have to direct you much in King oF New York, that your character Frank White came from you. Well... I always thought Frank White was obviously abandoned as a child. He's a little like the boy who was raised by wolves. I thought of him as always with animals, as an animal in fact, a hawk. He was noble but he was predatory. He came up in a very strange way and it left its mark. That's the way I make the bridge between myself, raised in showbusiness, and Frank White.

Ferrara also said that one only had to look at you to realise that you'd gone through some heavy duty shit. Not really, when I look at other people's lives. I have been in a very savvy, tough, competitive atmosphere all my life, so maybe that's what he means. It would be very hard to fool me. I must sound boastful, but I'm positive that's the case. I don't think I'm damaged. I think I'm strange. I'm happy being strange.

One of your best performances, and one of your most disturbed, disturbing performances was as Robert in The Comfort Of Strangers. Did playing that kind of part affect you off-screen? Robert was deeply troubled. I never really got to the bottom of him. That actually became an issue for me, just in terms of how to deal with him, just forgetting to try to understand him, realising that I never would, no matter how hard I tried. It became easier when I accepted that, when I just surrendered to this man who has his own reasons, deeply dark ones. When I saw the movie, it seemed to me like a Hänsel and Gretel fairy tale - this innocent couple get lost in the forest, and they meet the witch and his wife who want to put them in the oven.

In some respects, acting is about making what's hidden, visible, but with you it always seems about withholding things from the audience. There are all these surface gestures going on but it sometimes seems as if there's nothing concrete or fixed behind them. Robert's a little like that, a theatrical blank It's hard to figure whether or not he's just making up the stories about his sadistic father. I think Robert is making the whole thing up. What he really wants to do is slit Rupert Everett's throat. Personally I don't understand that whole sex death equation. It's never made any sense to me. I don't understand it, even academically, the' sex violence thing. Violence doesn't strike me as anything resembling sexy.

Actually, some female friends of mine said that you were the kind of man they could imagine having dangerous sex with. Well the part of Robert is sexual, definitely, but no... um, I highly disapprove.

CULT STARDOM IS ALL about fetishes, about obsessing over fragments charged with magical, personal, rather thin official meaning. Cult fans take their heroes home in little, luminously significant pieces. They get hung up on the significance of gestures, swaggers, winks, hairstyles . One reason why Christopher Walken is the ultimate cult star. His performances are basically assemblages of clever gestures and distinctive details, and there's an awful lot to take away and ponder - his twitching eyebrows, threatening smile, his various blank stares and, most importantly, his hair. There are four basic questions to ask Christopher Walken. Are you as weird as you look? What happened to your face? How come you're in so many bad movies? And what's going on with your hair? And, of these, the most important is the last. In his recent stage shows, Paul Merton told a joke which went something like: "My hair's got a life of its own, you know. The other night I came in the kitchen and caught it making an omelette." Walken's hair doesn't just have its own life. It's got its own career. Glossy magazines chart its CV in picture spreads, from late-Seventies bouffant to Frank White's ascetic brush cut in King Of New York. Journalists ponder the intentions behind various dos. It gets so much attention that I figured Walken was probably sick of talking about it. I was unsure how to broach the subject. I needn't have worried. Walken starts in on his hair himself, and once he's on to the subject, it's rather difficult to get him off.

You're approaching 50. Are you pleased with the way you've aged? Sure. For a person of my age, to have as much hair as I do is great. I think it's one of my best features. I'm pleased with my hair. I've got great hair.

Do you ever have bad hair days? I have relative hair days. I have had bad haircuts but it was because... let me explain [the following is spoken in the tones of mafia don imparting words of hard-won wisdom to a young footsoldier.] People who do hair are very temperamental, really. Sometimes you can find a perfectly good hairdresser who's simply having a nervous break-down that day and gives you a terrible haircut. This has happened to me. [He looks bemused and outraged.] It's like fate. It shouldn't have happened but it did and you can't do anything.

Right... so do you get special cuts for different roles? I just want it to look good. The thing is, I'm a very bad impersonator. It's just not my strong point. All my life, in the theatre, the minute I put on a putty nose or a wig, I'm usually awful. I'm best when I look something sort of like myself.

Do you ever feel like your hair is taking over? My hair is famous. But even before I was famous, people were talking about my hair, complementing it, criticising it, commenting on it, all my life. When I was a kid the other kids used to talk about my hair.

OK, enough about hair. Apparently,you've have a play about Elvis. Yes, which brings us back to hair. I think Elvis may have been a big influence on my hair. The minute I saw him, I started combing my hair that way.

OK, I give in. We're never going to get away from hair. You see how interesting it is.

So did you have long hair in the Sixties? I had hair all the way down my back, but it was still sort of like Elvis with long hair. It was big hair, tall hair. It went up and it went down.

Did you also experience the other Sixties indulgences - sex, drugs, rock'n'roll? I went through the various generational experiences, but my main influence would have been the Fifties. The American Graffiti atmosphere, which was in a strange way very sanitised, extremely odd, but great.

So when did you write the Elvis play? I was doing Batman and I had big chunks of time when I wasn't doing anything. So I read a lot of books, and tons of tabloid stuff and lust wrote it pretty quickly. I just took the idea that he didn't die, that he just wanted to get away, that he's pushing 60, has lost weight, doesn't eat bad food any more and is sort of a solid citizen.

Have you met anyone who's seen Elvis? Sure. I finished a job recently in Maine and I decided to drive back to New York. It was at night, in the middIe of nowhere and I drove past a motel which had a sign up saying "Elvis Seen Here". So I went in and the office was deserted. I rang the bell and a man came out, a very big man with a huge pompadour, just like Elvis, but he was old, it was silver hair. He told me Elvis was seen right out here on the highway the other night. And this guy wasn't kidding. That's how I feel about the UFO people. I met some when I was doing Communion [the film based on Whitley Streiber's book about alien abductions.] They're serious. Maybe it's true. Maybe there are aliens. It'd be great if there were.

So why, after wanting to take over our minds in the Fifties, do aliens pack an anal probe these days when they touch down on earth? They have to do something. I like the idea that aliens would be benevolent. Why wouldn't they be?

People aren't always nice to their dogs. If you're nice, you are. Actually, according to the Tibetan Book Of The Dead that's the only question you have to answer to get into heaven: were you good to animals?

So do you believe in God? Absolutely, never had a doubt. I was just born that way. It's just the basic thing.

What's happened to the script you wrote about the porn star John Holmes? That was a few years ago, but I'm too old to do it now. He was like the Elvis of porn. The script was about the curse of one's gift.

So Holmes was cursed by his big penis? Well, by his gift. Van Gogh was tortured by his talent. I think it can happen. My movie was about a guy who was an ordinary guy, a very nice man, an adult who was just kind of discovered. He had this, um, big talent but he just took it for granted. Then he was launched into this huge career. It was about getting famous real fast.

If you had made the film, would you have worn a specially constructed prosthetic? I don't think that would have been part of it. It wouldn't have been about that. I believe in a movie where there are givens. Maybe that's why I'm good at villains, because if the other people say you're a villain, you don't have to be a villain. You are whatever they say you are until you demonstrate otherwise. I think that's true of everything as far as acting goes. I always figure that if they say he's this guy, you just have to play the scenes. There wouldn't have been any X-rated scenes.

Acting is about withholding, keeping something from the audience. They could go watch the real thing if they wanted some of that. This would be more of an acting movie.

You once said that the only thing that scared you was not working? Not scares me exactly. I just feel uncomfortable with not working. I don't really have anything to do. I don't have any kids. I don't have any hobbies. No sports. Some people... they play tennis. They have an agenda. I don't.

But hasn't your desire to stay busy led you to do some dodgy movies. Are there any you wish you hadn't done? Not really... well of course I do think that. But really that's just the way it goes.

THE THING ABOUT cult actors is that you can forgive them anything. In fact it helps if they're in as many bad films as possible. It means that following their careers requires an act of masochistic determination and devotion. Walken has been in more dodgy films than most. He once said he felt as if he was never in control of his career, and looking at the worst of his recent output, you can believe it. In the last couple of years he's cropped up looking freakily detached in V-movies like McBain, a Central American political revenge thriller, and Scam, a stodgy exercise in multiple double crosses.
However, he says he now wants to take a kind of control and strike out in a different direction. He wants to play comedy. Now he's older, he thinks he can play fathers and uncles, romantic leads (he does, after all, have the hair for it). It all sounds nice in theory. But his list of upcoming projects sounds like the usual creepshow. He has a bit part in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Ficuon, as "a guy back from Vietnam". He stars alongside Dennis Hopper in Search And Destroy, a "dark comedy about a guy on the run from the IRS, drawn into making movies", written by Michael Almereyda and directed by celebrated post-modern artist David Salle. He will also crop up in Gregory Widen's God's Army, a thriller about revolution in Heaven, in which he plays a rebel angel. There's also talk of him working with Abel Ferrara again.
In the meantime, he's trying his hand at directing a stage production of Chekhov's Ivanov. Perhaps because it doesn't rely on the close-up, theatre gives Walken a little more leeway. He's always doing comedy on stage, he says. Apparently he can give free rein to the old-style showbiz chutzpah that was much in evidence in his appearances on Sarurday Nigh: Live. He does, apparently, have vague ambitions to take things a little finther. Hard as it may be to believe, it seems that the Duke of Spook would like to try his hand at being the King of Comedy. This comes to light when I ask what irritates him the most.
"You know what really burns my ass?" he replies. "A candle about three feet high."

Boom boom. Tell me a proper joke. OK. A duck walks into a drugstore and he says to the pharmacist, could I please have some lip gloss? The pharmacists say, certainly sir, here you are, will this be cash or charge? And the duck says, oh, put it on my bill. [He wheezes with laughter.]

That's a terrible joke. That's my favourite joke. It's an ambition of mine to be a standup comedian. A comic like Rodney Dangerfield, you know, those guys who just do jokes. They don't have themes, there's no political references, no current affairs, just gags - boom boom boom. I saw Rodney Dangerfield for an hour and a half, and it was just amazing, like a machine gun. If I were to do standup, I would do it like that, just get 50 gags and tell them, no matter what the reaction was. Benny Hill was a favourite of mine. I always wanted to meet Benny Hill. He died, didn't he?

So what would you do if people didn't laugh? But they would. They do laugh. Here's a Rodney Dangerfield joke. On the way here I was arrested for jaywalking. The crowd was screaming don't take him alive". [He starts wheezing again.] I haven't been so scared since I saw my wife in shorts.

You're just a Fitfties song-and-dance showbiz guy really? Absolutely.

By JIM McCLELLAN in FACE (June 94)

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