Christopher Walken names his worst-ever performance: “I don’t think I’ve ever been as bad”
If an actor has made as many movies over as long a period of time as Christopher Walken, it’s understandable if they’ve either never seen them or forgotten about them entirely.
Plenty of stars claim they don’t ever revisit their work once they’ve gotten the premiere out of the way, although Samuel L Jackson, one of the few who admits that he loves watching himself, isn’t buying that it’s as industry-wide as so many thespians seem to suggest.
Walken has amassed well over 100 credits across film and television since making his screen debut as a child in the short-lived 1953 sitcom Wonderful John Acton, but he’s never taken the work home with him. In fact, the Academy Award winner has never seen a lot of his movies so much as once.
He remembers the masterpieces, the classics, and the underrated and overlooked gems, though, and it’s his simple approach to life that’s kept him so busy he wouldn’t have the time to watch his credits even if he wanted to. Walken has confessed that having no children, computer, or internet connection is as idyllic as it gets, and he’s known to accept virtually every offer that comes his way because he loves to work.
Inevitably, every actor has at least one performance they regret. Walken wasn’t best pleased that he’d cornered the market on eccentric oddballs with a dangerous and often sadistic streak, especially when scripts were rewritten to suit his distinctive cadence, and there’s one turn he branded the worst of all.
Naturally, his recollections began with an anecdote about Laurence Olivier: “It was some part, and he calls it the green umbrella,” he told Now. “And I can’t remember what part it was, but he said he couldn’t play the part all through rehearsal, he couldn’t do anything. And then the director said, ‘Why don’t you carry an umbrella?’ And that’s what did it. Then everything was okay.”
What Walken was getting at was how sometimes all it takes is a prop or costume to push a performance from great to ghastly: “It goes the other way, too. The wrong pair of shoes, the wrong hat, you’re gonna be lousy in the part.” Unfortunately, that reminded him of his lowest ebb.
“I remember once I worked for a director on two movies, and it was just delightful, and I was very good in both those movies,” he explained. “And then, the third one, he said, ‘Chris, we’ve worked so well together’, and he said, ‘But I want you to have a look’. And I thought, ‘Uh-oh.'”
The unnamed filmmaker “took me to a hair salon, and he sat there while he had it styled and then tinted and everything.” When Walken tried on his outfit and performed his scenes, it stuck with him for all the wrong reasons: “I don’t think I’ve ever been as bad as I was in that movie. Because every second I was onscreen, I was uncomfortable.”
While it was nice of him not to name names, it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. The only directors Walken has worked with at least three times are Abel Ferrara and Tony Scott, and the only time he made a third film with one of them and had tinted hair was in the latter’s 2005 semi-biographical thriller, Domino.
Walken only has a small role as Mark Heiss, an unscrupulous reality TV producer who dispatches a camera crew to follow Keira Knightley’s title character on her bounty hunting exploits and he hams it up for the cheap seats, but all it took was a dodgy dye job for the actor to believe it was his worst-ever performance.
