Christopher Walken’s first experience with opium was literally bullshit: “It just made me sick”
Unlike many of his ‘New Hollywood’ contemporaries, Christopher Walken wasn’t particularly enamoured with drugs. He did dabble in narcotics, though, and it was an experience he’d never forget.
Virtually every actor who rose to prominence during the 1970s was a fiend for one of two things: alcohol or cocaine. In many cases, not to name any Jack Nicholson in particular, they loved both equally and spent their free time ingesting as much as humanly, or inhumanly, in some cases, as possible.
He drinks, but only in moderation. He largely avoided drugs, but based on his own harrowing account of trying opiates, he’s tried at least one. Walken also has a reputation for being a pretty strange guy, so it’s entirely on-brand for him to literally end up with a mouth full of bullshit when he ingested the drug in a way that doesn’t come recommended.
To be fair, opium can be consumed raw or in pill form, but a licensed physician definitely wouldn’t suggest to anyone, regardless of whether they’re a patient or not, that they eat a mysterious lump of it in a dimly-lit establishment in Thailand, which is what happened to Walken when he was filming The Deer Hunter.
Michael Cimino’s incendiary war epic landed the star an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ and provided the foundation that he built his career on, and with the entire film being shot on location, he was within his rights to spend his time away from the set seeing what the country had to offer.
When Jesse Thorn mentioned on his Bullseye podcast that he’d heard a rumour about Walken eating opium, the eccentric icon confirmed its veracity. “No, that’s right. I did,” he confirmed. “Somebody said, ‘Here.’ And I said, ‘What do you do with it?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.’ So I ate it. And I got a terrible intestinal infection.”
That’s not one of the side effects usually associated with opium, and when he was asked how he ended up suffering gastrointestinal problems, Walken offered an explanation that made the whole thing sound even worse: “Because they mixed it with buffalo dung or something like that.”
Shockingly, a mixture of raw opium and buffalo shit heading on a one-way street towards Walken’s stomach didn’t leave him with a euphoric high. Instead, he got nothing from the drug and felt like his insides were about to explode. “It was terrible,” he admitted. “You know, it didn’t really even have any effect. It just made me sick.”
‘Don’t do drugs’ is a message that’s been hammered home to generations of impressionable youths. However, ‘Don’t do drugs like Christopher Walken and eat raw opium mixed with buffalo dung’ is nothing if not catchier, albeit highly specific to his one-and-done dalliance with the black stuff.
Needless to say, it was a mistake he wouldn’t make again, even if he’s surely one of the very few visitors who grabbed a handful of the stuff and shoved it in his gob without a care in the world, despite having absolutely no idea if that was even how it was supposed to be taken.
