Why doesn’t Christopher Walken like watching himself on screen?
Since his Academy Award-winning portrayal of the shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran Nick Chevotarevich in Michael Cimino’s 1978 movie The Deer Hunter, Christopher Walken has become a Hollywood legend. Over the past 40 years, the New York-born actor has enjoyed lead and supporting roles in timeless classics, including The Dead Zone, Pulp Fiction, Catch Me If You Can and Seven Psychopaths.
Most recently, the 80-year-old actor teamed up with British comedy writer and actor Stephen Merchant for his BBC One crime thriller comedy The Outlaws, in which he portrays Frank Sheldon, a former conman who lives with his estranged daughter and grandchildren while he serves a community service term in Bristol.
While most of us know Walken for his acting on screen, his favoured platform is on stage. Notably, he starred alongside Irene Worth in a popular 1975 Broadway revival of Sweet Bird of Youth. His early stage acting career also saw him cast as the Shakespearean characters Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Coriolanus.
Later in his career, Walken earned a Tony Award nomination for ‘Best Actor in a Musical’ for his performance in the Broadway show James Joyce’s The Dead in 2000. His second Tony nomination came in 2010 for a memorable role in Martin McDonagh’s play, A Behanding in Spokane.
Walken’s attraction to the stage is perhaps rooted in his perfectionist tendencies. Like many actors, he doesn’t enjoy watching himself on screen. In a conversation with The Talks, Walken was asked whether he’s ever fully satisfied with his performances.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he began in response. “For me, in movies, it’s always a mixed bag. I’ve never made a movie where I thought, ‘You were really good in that movie; you were good all the time.’ No. It’s always, ‘You didn’t get it, you didn’t do it in that scene, but the other scene is pretty good.’ So I just hope that in balance there’s more good scenes than not.”
Continuing, Walken explained that his confidence very much depends on the director with whom he’s working. “A lot of it has to do with the director, actually,” he said. “There are certain directors where you know you’re going to be good or you’re not going to be there. There are people where you kind of know that if you miss the mark, then it’ll probably not be in the movie, and that’s very reassuring.”
In spite of this, Walken is often surprised by the outcome of his on-screen performances. “There are movies that I’ve made where I thought I was going to be good, but when it was cut it together, it wasn’t,” he explained. “And there are a lot of movies that, for one reason or another, just don’t become popular.
“So, to me, it’s always been a little bit of a roll of the dice,” he added. “That’s the way it goes. I’ve made quite a number of movies that I’ve never even seen, and I’ve made some movies that I thought were good that nobody saw… Sometimes they end up on television, you know.”
“I’ve done a lot of things I cringe when I watch and some things I’m proud of,” Walken concluded. “Movies are strange. You have to be a little bit lucky with them. I’ve never made a movie I wasn’t surprised to see.”
Watch Christopher Walken in one of his greatest scenes from Martin McDonagh’s 2012 movie Seven Psychopaths below.
