“Walkenising”: Christopher Walken’s least favourite thing about being Christopher Walken
Over the years, Christopher Walken has developed a reputation for being a wild, crazy guy. He’s played countless eccentrics in his career, sometimes for comedic effect, but more often than not, his characters tend to fall into the “Oh my God, this guy is terrifying in such a bizarre way” category. In truth, the unique star has always claimed he’s nowhere near as weird in real life as his characters would have the audience believe. However, the persona is so established now that it’s impossible to separate him from it – and it often leads to his least favourite thing about being Christopher Walken.
From the very first roles that brought him to the attention of audiences, Walken has always stood out as a one-of-a-kind performer. He believes it all stems from his roles in Annie Hall and The Deer Hunter in the 1970s, in which he played a suicidal man bent on crashing into cars and a PTSD-suffering Vietnam veteran who shoots himself in the head during a harrowing game of Russian roulette. Neither of these characters was a “normal” guy, and over the years, he began to rack up more characters that explored his gifts with the malevolent and absurd.
Walken isn’t surprised, therefore, that audiences have a certain image of him in their heads – usually involving odd, gravity-defying hair and a distinctive cadence when speaking dialogue. He told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2012, “I’ve played a lot of strange people, and I think it bleeds over. Of course, what is strange? I’ve also played nice, normal guys who are normal until things happen and they change. That’s true of everybody.”
The following year, Walken told Parade magazine, “People get mixed up with the parts I play, but I’m really a very conservative guy.” He’s not wrong, either – as he says himself, he’s been married to the same woman for 50 years, doesn’t really have hobbies or much of a social life, doesn’t particularly enjoy travelling, and generally prefers staying home whenever he’s not working. In fact, in that regard, it could be argued that he is not only not weird – but he’s also pretty dull.
To his chagrin, though, his on-screen oddball magnetism has always trumped his real-life unremarkability, and it usually leads to the thing that rankles him the most about his public perception. “Quite often, I’ll be sent a script for a movie,” Walken told The Guardian. “And I find that I like it, so I say I’ll do it. But then they rewrite it for me. They make it quirky. Odd. I find that rather annoying. I call it ‘Walkenising’.”
Irritatingly, Walken even employs measures to try to mitigate this “Walkenising” process that aggravates him so much. If he reads a script and thinks he’d be terrible in the role, he declines the part. Similarly, if he reads a script and thinks the role is too over-the-top and too eccentric on the page, he turns it down. This means that the roles he signs on the dotted line for are the ones that have already been through his screening process. So, when he sees them being altered to be more Walken-y, it’s extra frustrating. After all, he specifically chose them because they weren’t overtly Walkenised.
Fascinatingly, Walken told Daily Actor in 2012 that this has happened so often to him in his career that he insisted something be added to all his contracts. That’s right – it’s now legally binding that movie productions have to seek Walken’s approval if they want to alter his character to be more off-the-wall. He wryly smiled, “If you give me the part and you change it, it’s got to be OK with me.”
