“I knew I didn’t want to work with him”: why Mel Gibson called Christopher Walken the antichrist
There are several obvious and highly specific reasons why people don’t want to work with Mel Gibson, but the fallen superstar has an even more niche reason for never even contemplating a collaboration with Christopher Walken.
As evidenced by the dozens of shoddy straight-to-video credits he’s been racking up for the last decade, Gibson has no trouble finding employment. However, he remains ostracised from mainstream Hollywood almost two decades after the first high-profile incident that derailed his career.
In fact, things have gotten so bad that in the marketing for his most recent directorial effort, the dismal action thriller Flight Risk, his name was omitted entirely from the trailers and posters, as if audiences aren’t savvy enough to realise who ‘the director of Braveheart, Apocalypto, and Hacksaw Ridge‘ is.
Meanwhile, Walken has continued cementing his position as the industry’s most beloved eccentric, the living embodiment of Tinseltown’s weird uncle who’s slightly off-centre in the most endearingly possible way. He’s booked and busy and rubbing shoulders with the brightest talents and most vaunted filmmakers in the business, a position Gibson hasn’t been in for going on 20 years.
And yet, the two-time Academy Award winner shared that he was dead-set on avoiding the Oscar-winning Deer Hunter favourite at all costs because he was completely and utterly convinced that he was the devil incarnate. Sure, Walken has been called many things by many people, but the antichrist?
“He came to see me on a rooftop in New York, he said, ‘Can I talk to you?'” Gibson recalled, ominously setting the stage. I said, ‘Sure’, he floated in sideways through a crowd of people, he was wearing black, and it was like one of those old vampire movies where they don’t walk, they glide.”
So far, so Walken-esque, but then Gibson became convinced there were sinister goings-on afoot. Naturally, it was a discussion about Middle Age torture devices that convinced him. “My assistant was there,” the Lethal Weapon figurehead recalled. “And he left because he couldn’t stand it anymore. The air had turned cold, he left, and I wanted to leave because I knew I didn’t want to work with him, and he was getting scary.”
Trying to bring an end to their chilling encounter, Gibson revealed that he was “looking at a building with the top of the sixes on it,” and only three of them illuminated to create the number of the beast. Dun dun dun. Like any reasonable person would, there was only one conclusion to reach: “He started smiling. I thought, ‘Oh no, Chris Walken is the antichrist.”
Walken has played an angel in The Prophecy, but he’s never played the devil. Coincidence? Of course. Then again, Gibson probably thinks he’s reluctant to get too into character and blow his cover, leaving The Passion of the Christ director adamant that he’ll never share the screen or cast the guy who exists at the opposite end of the heaven-to-hell spectrum. According to him, anyway.
