Five times Christopher Walken has proved he’s an idiosyncratic icon
There aren’t too many actors in history to have seen the way they speak become firmly embedded in the cultural consciousness, but Christopher Walken has been part of that exclusive club for a long time.
In the same way virtually every impressionist has tried their hand at Arnold Schwarzenegger, Morgan Freeman, and Marlon Brando at least once, Walken’s unmistakable cadence has become a phenomenon unto itself.
Not that it takes anything away from a legendary career that’s seen him rack up hundreds of credits spanning half a century in every genre under the sun, with the Academy Award-winning star regarded as one of the all-time greats for his towering contributions to cinema.
He’s as idiosyncratic as it gets both on-camera and off, but establishing that reputation has been far from manufactured. In fact, it’s been a recurring theme throughout his entire life.
Five iconic Christopher Walken moments:
5. He was a lion tamer in a travelling circus
Walken’s idiosyncrasies were on full display long before he made his screen debut, and there can’t be many future Hollywood superstars who can say they once worked as a lion tamer for a travelling circus.
At the age of 16, Walken may have only spent a month working with the big cats, but he nonetheless forged a deep bond with Sheba, the lion he was tasked with wrangling. When asked how he ended up with the gig, his response pretty much summed up his mindset when he responded by asking, “Who’s going to turn that down?”
Not the teenage Walken, that’s for sure, and it fostered a lifelong love of felines that carried through his entire life. Before he was an Oscar winner and long before he was even an actor, he was just a kid with an Elvis Presley obsession who tamed lions for a living.
4. He’s made a habit of telling people it’s his birthday on set to get cake
Having spent decades of his life on film sets, it must be difficult for Walken to continue orchestrating one of his favourite pranks, with several co-stars making things a lot trickier by giving the game away that he loves to tell people it’s his birthday – even when it’s not – so he gets cake and attention.
Seann William Scott, who worked with Walken on 2003’s The Rundown, shared how he saw the actor looking “really sad, standing outside of his trailer”. With a mischievous glint in his eye, he told the American Pie alum that even though it wasn’t his birthday, “I’ll say it is in a week, and I guarantee you they’ll bring me a cake”. Right on cue, that’s precisely what happened.
After collaborating on 2007’s Balls of Fury, co-star Maggie Q told an almost identical story in a Reddit AMA, revealing that Laurence Fishburne had pre-warned her of Walken’s fake birthday bit. “One thing that he does that he loves is he likes to lie and say it’s his birthday,” she said. “Because he wants everyone to buy him a cake, and sing to him, and it’s never his birthday when he does this.”
3. He’s got “six subtexts” and “a thousand ways” of saying “pass the salt”
One of Walken’s hallmarks has always been his distinctive and off-kilter line delivery, with the actor making a mockery of the notion that mundane sentences can’t be delivered with their own highly specific charm.
To illustrate his unique approach, he used the simple phrase of “pass the salt” as an example. “All my scripts are absolutely covered in notes, so any time I say anything – even ‘pass the salt’ – I have six subtexts, comments on what I really mean when I’m saying that”. It’s a basic phrase on paper, but not as it applies to Walken’s methodology.
“There are a thousand ways to say ‘Pass the salt’,” he continued. “It could mean, you know, ‘Can I have some salt?’ or it could mean, ‘I love you.’ It could mean, ‘I’m very annoyed with you.’ Really, the list could go on and on.” Armed with that knowledge, his singular style suddenly makes a great deal more sense.
2. He’s never sent a text or an email in his life
If Bill Murray thought he had the market cornered on being deliberately unreachable, then he’s got nothing on Walken, albeit for entirely different reasons. The latter hasn’t gone out of his way to ignore modern technology; he just never got around to embracing it.
Not only has he never owned his own mobile phone, but he’s never sent a text message or an email. When he was required to do virtual promotional duties, “somebody had to come and set this up because I don’t have a cell phone or computer.”
Admitting he was “right at a certain age where it just passed me by,” Walken compared having a phone on his person to a watch because “if you need one somebody else has got it”. On the occasions where production has mandated the use of one, he liked it to a tracking collar “so that they can find me”. Despite forsaking technology, though, he’s continued to be as prolific as he’s ever been.
1. He’s the king of stealing the show in a single scene
Never has the prospect of hiding things up your ass been more intoxicating than when it was described by Walken in his unforgettable one-scene cameo in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which was hardly the first – or last – time he waltzed into a movie with minimal screentime and stole the show.
From Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Oliver Stone’s True Romance to Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow and Gore Verbinski’s Mouse Hunt, Walken has mastered the art of maximising his minutes. The concept of phoning it in is something that’s never been part of his performative lexicon, and it’s always shown.
Whether he’s the main character or swinging by for five minutes or less, Walken gives it his all every time, with his litany of cameo appearances and one-scene contributions almost always lingering as one of the most memorable elements of any film lucky enough to have him pop up in a limited capacity.
