The only role that haunted Christopher Walken: “I didn’t ever want to see him again”
Some movie scenes stay with you forever. So haunting, so funny, or so tragic that the impact of them exists way beyond the end credits. In fact, this particular one has stayed with me for 15 years.
During the humdrum of post-Christmas and pre-New Year, everything becomes boring. It becomes boring because of how exposed we’ve been to it for the previous two days. Surprisingly, a turkey and gravy sandwich won’t keep me entertained, nor will the 10th game of Premier League football I’ve just watched in consecutive days. And no matter how desperate I am to watch a film, I’m always hesitant, for the context of my request often means my suggestion will get overruled for something jovial and festive.
But this one year, I managed to strong-arm my family into a “proper” film. The catch was, my uncle got to choose it, and in a bid to clear the room of everyone, including myself, he put on the 1978, three-hour epic The Deerhunter. At that age, though, I was curious about all things culture, and so, noticing the stellar ensemble cast and historic backdrop in which their story was set, I knew this watch would be a formative experience.
The film was dense yet captivating, and I was largely transfixed by Christopher Walken’s performance in that first half of the movie. It all culminated when I finally reached the famed russian roulette scene, where these childhood best friends were forced to confront their mortality with one another. It felt painfully real throughout the entirety of it, and that’s mainly because it was.
Whether it was the Vietnamese actor genuinely slapping Walken across the face in the shot, creating a genuinely rageful reaction from Walken in the scene, or Robert De Niro, who supposedly requested a real bullet be used in the scene to create a genuine sense of jeopardy. I was on tenterhooks, with no real way of knowing how this would conclude or how I should feel about it, were it to do so tragically.
That palpable feeling resurfaced later in the film, when De Niro and Walken found themselves once again, face to face with a revolver and one bullet. Walken, like a wounded puppy, was put out of his misery, but the expression on his face in that confused Vietnamese gambling hall seemed to haunt me for years after.
It’s a scene I’ve never been able to shake because of how I had viewed Walken until that point. He had been an otherwise warm and gentle figure in the cinematic world in which I grew up, and to see this darkness was wholly jarring.
It feels the antithesis of Walken the man, and so when it rears its head, the actor himself does his very best to suppress it. While the story goes that his portrayal of Nick in The Deerhunter took a while to shake loose, there was another time when he was confronted with his inner darkness. While playing the antagonist in a play, like Cato the Younger in 2002, Walken supposedly glanced at himself in the mirror before realising just how much of a grip the character had on him.
“I saw him looking back at me,” he chillingly recalled. He added, “I looked away immediately. It scared me. I didn’t ever want to see him again.”
It’s these roles that have made Walken the beloved actor he is. But don’t get it twisted, that greatness comes with a price.
