“He didn’t want to do it”: The one and only time Christopher Walken turned down a movie
The easiest way to get Christopher Walken in your movie is to ask Christopher Walken to be in your movie, because the prolific actor is incredibly unlikely to say no.
He might be slowing down a bit, which is to be expected when he’s in his 80s, but cinema’s favourite eccentric uncle has repeatedly admitted that the reason why he’s amassed well over 150 credits across stage and screen is that he loves to work, and if someone offers him the chance to work, he’ll take it.
Naturally, that means the quality of his pictures has veered wildly from the all-time classic to abhorrent trash, even if he remains the only person brave enough to mount an impassioned defence of Gigli. Plenty of actors, especially those with legendary status, are known to be a little choosy, but that’s not Walken.
The Academy Award winner has called acting “the most important thing I do,” since he doesn’t have any children or hobbies. It’s what gets him up in the morning, it’s what keeps him occupied, and it’s what pays the bills, although the downside is that he also described his career trajectory as “pretty reckless.”
The most obvious downside of saying yes to virtually everything, according to Walken, is that he’s “done a lot of things that, when I see myself onscreen, I have to shut my eyes.” There have been a couple of parts that he wanted or didn’t get or agreed to play and backed out of at the last minute, but only one that he flat-out rejected.
The veteran confessed that he’d unsuccessfully auditioned for Ryan O’Neal’s part in Love Story, and he was initially cast as the villain in Cliffhanger before dropping out right before shooting, allowing John Lithgow to step in, ham it up, and devour the scenery as Sylvester Stallone’s over-acting nemesis instead.
What makes it even stranger is that Walken refused to reunite with a director he knew very well. After collaborating on King of New York, The Addiction, and The Funeral in the 1990s, you’d assume that if Abel Ferrara offered his three-time partner a gig in a fourth feature, he’d gladly accept, which wasn’t the case.
“I wanted him for Go Go Tales, but he didn’t want to do it,” the director shared. “Christopher just kind of went a different way.” Touted by the filmmaker as his first intentional comedy, he recruited an eclectic cast that included Willem Dafoe, Asia Argento, Bob Hoskins, and Matthew Modine, but no Walken.
Seeing as Walken has made it known that he hates travelling long distances for shooting, the fact the New York-set film was shot almost entirely on soundstages at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios may have been a deal-breaker. He’d worked with Ferrara three times before, but he didn’t have the same enthusiasm when doing it again would require him to jet off to the other side of the world.
