Christopher Walken and a misguided ode to his lifelong Elvis obsession: “It wasn’t very good”
While acting is an all-encompassing pursuit for some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, it’s not unusual for others to have further artistic ambitions. For instance, some actors may want to direct eventually, so they’ll spend time learning from the directors they work with. Some may want to write their own screenplays, compose scores, or produce. Perhaps fittingly, though, Christopher Walken’s sojourn into artistic ambition – playwrighting – took him to a strange place. In essence, he wrote a show about conspiracy theories, Elvis Presley’s afterlife, and a secret sex change. Allow me to explain.
The roots of Walken’s decision to stretch his creative muscles by writing a play for the first time came while he was shooting 1992’s Batman Returns. One day during a break in filming, he was in a supermarket perusing the magazine aisle, and something caught his eye. It was a gossip rag with a truly stunning image on the front cover: Elvis in drag, with – as Walken put it – “great big knockers.” The article was all about a bizarre conspiracy theory that Elvis didn’t die in 1977, instead faking his death to undergo a gender transition operation to live out his days as a waitress in Morocco.
Walken had always been an Elvis fanatic from childhood, after his prom date showed him a magazine photograph claiming he was her boyfriend. “This guy looked like a Greek god,” the oddball star remembered in Christopher Walken: A to Z by Robert Schnakenberg. “Then I saw him on television. I loved everything about him.” The young Walken then adopted Elvis’s signature bouffant hairstyle, and still styles it as high as possible every day as a man in his 80s. “Maybe it’s a little shorter, or a little longer,” Walken conceded, “but the suggestion of Elvis is always there.”
So, tickled pink by the notion of his hero living and working as an anonymous female diner worker, Walken took it upon himself to write a play about Elvis living as a woman in Morocco with a truck driver husband. That wasn’t quite bizarre or surreal enough for him, though, so he set the play in limbo, where Elvis is surrounded by lookalikes and his stillborn brother Rob, who often plays ghostly tricks on Earthlings to make them think Elvis is still alive.
Walken’s wacky labour of love debuted at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1995, titled Him. He played his idol in a green velvet Las Vegas jumpsuit for scenes involving the Elvis know and love, and adopted drag when portraying him post-sex change. For 75 minutes, Walken let his inimitable mind run riot, and the results were, suffice it to say, mixed.
To his credit, Walken resolved that his performance wouldn’t be a simple impression of Elvis. Instead, he tried to find his own spiritual version of the great man, speaking in an overblown Southern accent that resembled Tennessee Williams more than the ‘King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’. His dialogue consisted of long-winded tales and rambling asides, and even though Walken came close to finding an artistic throughline a few times, The New York Times witheringly concluded the play was “cluttered with murky thoughts expressed in windy speeches, illustrated by anecdotes that have no point.”
Indeed, the overall critical response to Him was scathing, and Walken could have been forgiven for retreating into himself after going out on such a limb. However, while he might be eccentric, Walken is no dummy, and he knew he hadn’t put his best foot forward with this misguided ode to his hero. “It was the hardest thing I ever did, because it wasn’t very good,” the crestfallen star admitted. “It was very, very whimsical.”
Fascinatingly, Walken estimated that, for every eight performances of Him, only six were anything approaching funny. This was because he found the show’s quality was highly dependent on his mood on any given night, and if he wasn’t quite feeling it, he believed the audience picked up on that. “If I was feeling silly enough, and brave enough, outrageous enough, it usually worked OK,” Walken remembered. “That was usually on a weekend.” Unfortunately for him, theatre productions can’t live on weekends alone, and Him was consigned to history as a misbegotten curio.
