The role Christopher Walken was banned from playing: “I just couldn’t pull it off”
Through no fault of his own, Christopher Walken has spent his career battling against typecasting. If an actor successfully or iconically plays one unhinged, deranged, psychotic, or sinister character early on in their career, it’s a constant uphill battle to convince casting directors and filmmakers they can do anything else to similar levels.
It’s something the veteran has remarked upon a number of times, with his distinctive and inherently angular features making him the perfect conduit for onscreen villainy. There’s also his unmistakable voice and unique cadence, which has become a huge bugbear for Walken whenever he receives a script and realises it’s been written to mirror his signature line delivery.
That’s not to say he’s a one-trick pony, with Walken’s penchant for causing mischief behind the scenes on several productions parlaying into a successful sideline in comedy, where he’s allowed to cut loose and tickle audiences in the funny bone as opposed to sending shivers down their spine as he’s been wont to do in his most memorable roles.
He’s won an Academy Award, starred in countless classics and cult favourites, and collaborated with some of the industry’s most celebrated directors, but Martin Scorsese has never been one of them. It almost happened, though, with Walken set to play the title role in the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ before the studio got cold feet, overruled his casting, and then placed the entire project on ice.
Scorsese had wanted to adapt Nikos Kazantzakis’ book since the early 1970s, but he wasn’t the first to take a crack at it. Sidney Lumet was, and he admitted to the Los Angeles Times that he couldn’t do it. “I never could lick it in terms of a screenplay, and I just couldn’t pull it off,” he said.
For a while, it looked as though Scorsese couldn’t either. His first attempt at Temptation was set up at Paramount, with Robert De Niro turning down the chance to play Jesus. During that time, it was noted that Walken “was briefly named to the part, but Paramount rejected his casting,” leaving the filmmaker up shit creek without a messiah.
The Last Temptation of Christ ultimately ended up at Universal with Willem Dafoe in the lead, and in the four decades since Walken and Scorsese have yet to make a picture together. In an ideal world, Paramount would have footed the bill, but when the top brass grew increasingly concerned about the spiralling budget and vetoed the director’s choice for the main character, it set the film back by years.
Walken understandably has his regrets over being denied the chance to work with one of cinema’s greatest-ever auteurs, especially when it wasn’t Scorsese who denied him the chance to headline Temptation but the executives who balked at the prospect.
