A self-effacing icon: why Christopher Walken only considers himself “a good craftsman”
There have been plenty of superlatives lobbed in the direction of Christopher Walken over the years, and two of the most prevalent tend to be either ‘icon’ or ‘genius’. Just don’t say that to the man himself, though, because he’ll try his best to shoot it down.
Of course, humility is a quality to be celebrated in a place like Hollywood where success can often be fleeting, and the most famous practitioners of the creative arts regularly command multi-million dollar paycheques, but it would also be entirely fair to say Walken is underselling himself significantly.
He’s an Academy Award-winning legend of stage, film, and television, who always maximises every second of screentime they’re given. A substantial leading role? He’ll nail it. A supporting part? He’ll knock it out of the park. A cameo appearance? He’ll regularly end up walking away with the whole damn movie.
Not that he’d ever paint himself in such reverential colours, however, when Walken tends to point to his preparedness as being key. He’ll read a script over and over again until the dialogue becomes second nature, which he’ll then inject with his unmistakably idiosyncratic cadence and expressiveness.
Rewrites or improvisation are not to his liking, as Adam Sandler discovered when he worked with Walken, which might be why he views himself as being on a rung below genius on the ladder. There’s hardly going to be a shortage of folks who disagree, but the star singled out a friend and colleague who definitely fits the bill to illustrate his point.
That in itself is ironic when Walken won an Oscar for his performance in The Deer Hunter whereas co-star Robert De Niro did not, even if he believes he’d made a mistake. “I had been working on this very difficult scene for two or three weeks,” he told Total Film. “And then when the day came to shoot it I started to get real worried and I realised that my preparation was all wrong.”
For somebody with such a dialled-in approach to their research who rarely – if ever – deviates from their tried-and-trusted template of absorption through repetition, it was tantamount to an existential crisis. Conferring with De Niro, he altered the scene on a whim to assuage Walken’s worries, which resulted in the moment in question becoming “one of the best in the film”.
It’s not a revelation to call De Niro a genius looking at the body of work he’s accumulated, but Walken doesn’t see himself as being in the same ballpark. Whereas the former can dedicate themselves entirely to a character and still manage to work on the fly when the need arises or a better opportunity for drama presents itself, the latter relies almost exclusively on the words on the page to inform his worldview.
“That’s the mark of a genius like De Niro as opposed to a good craftsman like myself,” he confessed rather unfairly. “But that’s OK. We can learn so much from watching geniuses at work, even though we might never reach their level.”
It’s a harsh self-assessment, but it’s clear what Walken is trying to infer. If he was told on the day of shooting that his scenes had been completely abandoned and rewritten at short notice, he’d be beside himself because that’s not the way he’s ever worked. Conversely, De Niro thrived being completely malleable and synergetic within the context of the roles he embodied, so he wouldn’t have faced the same problems.
He’s definitely doing himself a disservice right enough, because nobody spends half a century delivering performances of Walken’s calibre with such regularity and proficiency in all manner of genres in so many different ways to only be remembered as a good craftsman and nothing more. There are plenty of those in the industry, there always has been, and there always will be, but he’s never been one of them.
