Why Christopher Walken hates punctuation
Following his Academy Award-winning portrayal of the shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran Nick Chevotarevich in Michael Cimino’s 1978 classic The Deer Hunter, Christopher Walken became a bonafide Hollywood legend. Over the past four decades, the New York-born actor has enjoyed lead and supporting roles in several other timeless classics of impressive range, including The Dead Zone, Pulp Fiction, Catch Me If You Can and Seven Psychopaths.
Most recently, the 80-year-old actor collaborated with British comedy writer and actor Stephen Merchant for his BBC One crime-comedy The Outlaws. In the popular series, which has run for two seasons so far, Walken portrays Frank Sheldon, a former conman who lives with his estranged daughter and grandchildren while he serves community service in Bristol.
In real life, however, Walken is no criminal, and nor does he have any children. “I don’t golf or play tennis. I have no kids. I’ve been married for 53 years,” Walken reflected in a 2022 interview with The New York Times when asked whether he had anything left he’d like to accomplish in his life.
“I sometimes think about writing something, but I don’t have much talent for that,” he continued. “You know, all actors have a trunk full of scripts. A lot of people do. Even my dentist, at one point, when he was doing my teeth, told me about a script he’d written.”
Unfortunately, like many others, Walken lacks either the experience, patience or self-belief required to pursue writing in earnest. “I’ve written things,” he said. “They’re just not good enough. I start with two people sitting in a room talking, and invariably, it becomes incoherent. There’s nothing I can be other than an actor.”
At this point, the interviewer, David Marchese, suggested Walken could cut his teeth on a memoir. Responding, Walken explained that he, in fact, already had an incoherent set of notes that could be shepherded into a memoir.
“I have yellow pads, stacks of them,” he revealed. “One of these days, I need somebody to help me get it organised. I was thinking of getting a court stenographer and just talking and having them write it down without any punctuation and seeing what would happen. I’ve always resented punctuation.”
Most budding writers are advised that good use of punctuation is foundational for conveying a plot efficiently. Alas, taking a leaf out of James Joyce’s dense and divisive masterwork, Ulysses, Walken is happy to discard hurdle-like punctuation marks and let letters rule the roost.
Walken proceeded to explain his position on punctuation: “Because if you’re performing the writer will put a question mark after something or an exclamation point or even a period It means that it’s the end of a thought and the beginning of another whereas in life conversation gets more schmeary Sentences overlap Thoughts overlap Somebody told me an interesting thing that the question mark is basically a hieroglyph”
After describing the humble question mark as “a cat walking away”, Walken revealed that he often applies his disdain for punctuation to scripts. “Sometimes, when I see a question mark in a script, I’ll deliberately make it a statement,” he said. “Or if something has an exclamation point, I’ll make it a question just to see what will happen. Punctuation can be a stumbling block, so I take it out.”
Watch Christopher Walken’s classic ‘Golden Watch’ monologue from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction below.
