CHRISTOPHER WALKEN

 
Christopher Walken has become one of our most idiosyncratic and unpredictable actors, onstage, on-screen, and in person. Few people know that Walken was a child actor who got his professional start as a song-and-dance man in musicals like Baker Street, Best Foot Forward, and High Spirits – so it was shocking when he turned up in the middle of the Steve Martin-Bernadette Peters movie Pennies from Heaven kicking up his heels to the tune of “Let’s Misbehave.” Likewise, after having established himself as a movie star in Next Stop, Greenwich Village, The Deer Hunter (for which he won an Oscar), and Brainstorm, Walken confounded expectations by taking a cameo role in the 1986 Lincoln Center revival of John Guare’s House of Blue Leaves, for which he was onstage only for the last ten minutes of the play.

Walken has crazy eyes – darting and secretive like a Lily Tomlin character. He combs his hair in four different directions and speaks in the oddly deliberate cadences of a Yiddish Theater veteran.

Did you always want to be an actor?
I come from a show-business family, so wanting to become an actor never crossed my mind. It was just a part of my life. My two brothers and I were child actors. In those days there was a lot of live television in New York. All the shows came from Rockefeller Center, and they used a lot of kids. There were agencies devoted to child actors.

What did your father do?
My father’s a baker. He had his own bakery in Queens. Curiously, my brothers worked much more than I did. It’s ironic that they went into other things, and I didn’t work much but stayed in the business.

When did you start thinking seriously about making it a career?
When I was about twenty. I was at Hofstra, in a psychology class, and I was looking out the window. It was a very nice day. I got up, went to my car, and I never went back to school. I started working. I got a job in a musical.

Did you ever study acting?
Yeah, with different people. Wynn Handman, he was good. I became a member of the Actors Studio some years ago and listened to Lee Strasberg and Kazan. The best studying I’ve done is working with Irene Worth, Rosemary Harris, Robert Preston. Or Bill Hurt, Harvey Keitel, and Jerry Stiller. That’s an education. When you’re onstage with Irene Worth and Rosemary Harris, you better be on your toes, because they can kick ass.

Were you always good as an actor?
No. Only recently.

What made the difference?
Just time. I was able to control it to some extent about the time I did Pennies from Heaven. Something in your biological clock tells you “You better get on the stick.” There’s a point at which I stopped being naïve about myself. Sometimes a certain innocence is good, but not about yourself. It’s come and gone since then, but I know what it is now. I’ve got my eye on what it is I’m for in show business.

When you started acting, did you think you would do movies?
I always hoped to. I’ve been very fortunate, because I’ve been involved in things that very often lead to obscurity. I was in some pictures that were not successful whatsoever. I think people admire persistence. People notice that I’m still there.

My first movie was The Anderson Tapes, the Sidney Lumet movie. I played the Kid. I was already pushing twenty-eight. By that time, people were already saying “How come you never made a movie?” I had gone up on commercials, which I was perfectly willing to do. But it was like going for jury duty and never getting picked for a jury.

I never made more than $11,000 ‘til I was almost thirty-five years old. I used to get unemployment quite a lot. I’ve been married for almost twenty years and my wife and I always did nicely. She was a dancer. As a matter of fact, we met doing a summer tour of West Side Story. I was Riff, the head of the Jets, and she was Graciela, his girlfriend.

Did you find acting in movies different from stage acting?
In the beginning, very much so. I never could get over the absence of the audience. When I did Pennies from Heaven – this is why I equate that with a kind of turning point in my life – my dance number was lying there like a pancake. I said, “How are you supposed to do this when nobody’s looking? This is a performance for an audience.” The great thing about Fred Astaire was that he always knew the audience was there, in his mind. You can see it in his dancing. So I said to the grips, all the young guys with hammers hanging off their belts – in a Hollywood production, there are many people standing around the set, many, many friends and their mothers – I said, “All you people, will you come down when we do this shot and give me some encouragement? Whistle, yell, let me know you’re there.” The whole number just took off.

Ever since then, the basis of my technique is to remember that the people standing on the set there are your audience. Instead of looking at their watches, I ask them to look at me. It’s amazing how people want to help if you ask them. It’s not like the guy running the lights doesn’t want to look at you – he feels like he has to look away. An audience never does that. An audience is the most dangerous thing in the world, because they paid, and they’re looking at you. And they paid! And there’s a lot of them! And they cast a cold eye, because they paid. To be on the stage, you have to be very secure.

Do you like being looked at?
Very much, when I feel good. Then I feel like my mind is as strong as all theirs put together, and they’re happy to be with me. Otherwise, it’s a disaster because you can feel their resentment coming, and it makes you shaky. That’s what they call stage fright. A good actor is like a racehorse or a Ferrari. If a cylinder is missing on a Chevy, it’s doesn’t matter that much. But if something’s not working right on a Ferrari, it makes a big difference. It’s the three percent that makes the difference between good and great. It’s a fine line. If you’re not there, it’s very painful.

In House of Blue Leaves, you just sit there looking out at the audience – it’s one of the weirdest, most Brechtian performances I’ve ever seen.
I’m looking at them and they’re looking at me. That’s what I’m here for. That’s what I meant before when I said I’m starting to know what I’m for. A lot of critics object to that, but I do it on purpose. I believe that’s what God wants me to do.

God wants you to look at the audience?
I know, you say something like that and people think you sound like the Ayatollah Khomeini. But I look around as an intelligent person and see so many wonderful actors doing the other thing – why would I want to enter than arena? I believe as a performer you have to create your own arena so that in a sense there is no competition.

What’s it like to do something like Hurlyburly, where you’re onstage with a constellation of actors like Bill Hurt, Harvey Keitel, Jerry Stiller, Sigourney Weaver, and Judith Ivey?
Absolutely fabulous. It’s one of the best things that can happen. It’s a ball game of a very special and exquisite, exotic sort. If you’re on your toes and they’re on their toes, you can cook. It’s as exciting as sports. When you work with people like that, there’s an element of unpredictability to it which might be called danger. You can’t take anything for granted. They throw you curves, you throw them curves. The watching and the listening, the constant reversing of those roles, is fascinating both to the actors and the audience. If I’m not sure what I’m going to do, they sense it, the audience – what’s he going to do? It makes them not take anything for granted. They don’t go to sleep.


from Caught in the Act: New York Actors Face to Face, a collaboration with photograph Susan Shacter (1986)