The one and only movie Christopher Walken and David Bowie both turned down: “He bailed”
Other than being wonderfully eccentric in their own unique way, Christopher Walken and David Bowie don’t have a whole lot in common, other than the fact that they both briefly passed like ships in the night on two different movies within the space of less than a decade.
When Roger Moore’s swansong as James Bond, A View to a Kill, was first announced, it was revealed that Bowie would be playing the villain, Max Zorin. Eon Productions seemed confident enough that it had gotten its man to announce the casting publicly, which made them look pretty stupid when he walked away from the role.
To be fair, the iconic musician had initially agreed to take the part, only to change his mind because he “didn’t want to spend five months watching my stunt double fall off cliffs,” which is fair enough. His acting career was made up of some eclectic and unexpected choices, and hamming it up as the baddie in a 007 adventure wasn’t something he was interested in when there wasn’t much actual acting to be required.
Instead, Walken signed on and agreed to nibble on the scenery in opposition to Moore’s eyebrow-raising secret agent, but only as the third choice, because Sting knocked it back, too. The idiosyncratic Academy Award winner and the ‘Thin White Duke’ circling the same picture once was strange enough, but then it happened all over again.
Renny Harlin admitted that when he was seeking the perfect performer to antagonise Sylvester Stallone in his cheese-tastic 1993 blockbuster, Cliffhanger, Bowie was the only name he had in mind. He was “pursued hard,” but in the end, he opted against cavorting around on various mountaintops while trying to retrieve their $100 million in stolen cash, all while being hunted down by a muscular ex-ranger.
History repeated itself when Walken took the gig, only to drop out at the last minute. John Lithgow gave a phenomenally over-the-top turn as Eric Qualen in the film, but he confessed that he “had been cast as the sort of second villain ” at first. “My role was supposed to be Christopher Walken,” he explained. “But he bailed, and they sort of moved me up the night before.”
If you can’t get Bowie, and you can’t get Walken, then Lithgow is as good a substitute as you can find. The chameleonic character man’s ludicrously entertaining performance as Denzel Washington’s mortal nemesis in 1991’s Ricochet should be required viewing for any actor who wants to see the best way to break bad in a glorified B-movie and make sure that every scene is completely stolen.
He did much the same in Cliffhanger, too, and it’s a role that holds a special place in Lithgow’s heart. And to think, the only reason he ended up taking second billing in the box office smash behind the Rocky and Rambo frontman was because David Bowie said no and Christopher Walken said yes, only to change his mind at the last second and leave the film in dire need of a villain.
