The actor who ruined Christopher Walken’s life: “This salad needs more cowbell”
In the entertainment industry, predicting what will become popular is nearly impossible. Even harder is foreseeing what will stay popular and endure in pop culture for decades. A perfect example of this is the most referenced performance from Christopher Walken’s career.
While he has brought countless iconic roles to life in films like The Deer Hunter, True Romance, Batman Returns, and Catch Me If You Can, none of these are the ones that follow him everywhere he goes. Instead, that honour belongs to a seemingly throwaway role—one created by an A-list star—which Walken himself has said ruined his life.
Walken has always been one of Hollywood’s favourite on-screen oddballs. Whether he’s appearing in a realistic drama or a horror movie, a silly comedy or an action movie, he will always bring something uniquely ‘Walken-y’ to it. Sometimes this entails him being the most intimidating screen presence in history, and sometimes it involves him being a weird goofball who doesn’t seem to know he’s being a weird goofball.
The combination of elements that make Walken such a singular performer also made him a perfect fit for one of the great comedy institutions of our time: Saturday Night Live. Over the years, he hosted the iconic NBC sketch show seven times, always bringing a welcome presence to the wacky and wonderful skits crafted by different generations of the cast. One sketch, however, stands out above all the others—”More Cowbell”.
When Walken appeared in the marvellously stupid sketch on the April 8th, 2000 episode of SNL, he could never have guessed it would stick to him like glue for the next 25 years. The sketch was styled as a faux Behind the Music VH1 documentary, depicting Blue Öyster Cult recording their hit song ‘(Don’t Fear) the Reaper’. Walken took on the role of their eccentric producer, Bruce Dickinson (not to be confused with the Iron Maiden frontman).
In the sketch, SNL cast member – and future A-list comedy star – Will Ferrell played the fictional Gene Frenkle, a man whose zeal for the peculiar sound of the cowbell is matched only by Dickinson’s. Throughout the skit, Frenkle plays the cowbell more and more vigorously until it overshadows everything else happening in the band – but according to Dickinson, it’s never enough. “I gotta have more cowbell,” he implores Frenkle before giving birth to the iconic catchphrase, “Guess what? I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell.”
To everyone’s surprise, the hilarious sketch took off and became a viral meme in the days before anyone had even coined that phrase. Over the years, it was referenced in movies and TV shows, played at sporting events – and was endlessly quoted to an exasperated Walken when he was going about his daily life. “I hear about it everywhere I go,” Walken told the Orlando Sentinel. “It’s been years, and all anybody brings up is ‘COW-bell.’ I guess you never know what’s gonna click.”
When Walken appeared on Conan in 2020, he told host Conan O’Brien that the sketch had even led him to exotic foreign locales. “I was in a restaurant in Singapore,” Walken revealed, “And the couple at the next table, at one point, the guy said to me, ‘Chris, you know, this salad needs more cowbell.'” While Walken was clearly amused by this, he was also baffled, and he insisted, “It’s run its course”.
Hilariously, though, Ferrell claims that Walken told him that the sketch “ruined my life” when he met him backstage in 2010 while the actor was performing A Behanding In Spokane on Broadway. Ferrell claimed a deadpan Walken grumbled that audience members “bring cowbells for the curtain call and bang them. It’s quite disconcerting.”
The Anchorman star chuckled, “I think he was really mad at me.”
