The role Christopher Walken waited his entire life to play: “That could be me”
Whether you grew up reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales and other classic children’s stories or preferred watching the Disney-fied versions on VHS tapes that you exhausted from repeated rewinding, we’re all familiar with the heroes and villains that shaped our early consciousness.
These stories, so often littered with terrifying figures serving as prescient warnings, are dark, and perhaps darker than the stories we prefer as adults, but as innocent little children, it’s hard not to have something awoken in us from this exposure to both good and evil, and no one is immune to the effects. Even Christopher Walken can attest to that, who once fell in love with a particular tale when he was young, but it took decades for him to finally satisfy his desire to appear in an adaptation of it.
The actor, who can seemingly do anything, from Pulp Fiction and Hairspray to Severance, immersed himself in the art of storytelling while fairly green, performing on stage as early as 1952, when he was just nine years old. It was in this magnificent world of Broadway and show business that he familiarised himself with JM Barrie’s classic children’s story, Peter Pan.
The story of a boy who never grows up and happens to possess that magical skill we all desire as children, the ability to fly, the character first appeared in the novel The Little White Bird before Barrie expanded on his story for the stage play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. It has been adapted for the stage (in musical form) and screen various times over the years, with the first big screen version realised in 1924, with a female actor, Betty Bronson, funnily enough playing the role of Peter.
The 1953 Disney animated version is perhaps the most beloved, although Steven Spielberg’s Hook and the 2003 live-action Peter Pan also remain incredibly popular iterations of the tale. Why didn’t Walken ever star in one of these versions is a good question that I don’t have the answer to, but in 2014, he was cast as Captain Hook in Peter Pan Live!, a musical which was broadcast straight to television. Oddly, Girls star Allison Williams played Peter, putting on a British accent and a boyish wig for the part for which she was far too old, and while it was a strange casting choice and the show divided critics, Walken didn’t care, for his dream of starring in Peter Pan had finally come true.
Walken told The New York Post, “When they asked me to do it, I said, ‘I’m not much of a singer. But I can dance a little bit’”, which clearly was enough to have him playing the primary villain, and he was able to bring out those moves he has demonstrated so often in his career, from his early days on stage to his performance in Fatboy Slim’s ‘Weapon of Choice’ music video.
“When I was a kid, I was in show business, so I was probably more aware of [Peter Pan] than most people. There were kids in it. [And I thought,] that could be me. I saw it many times. I saw it onstage with the great Cyril Ritchard. That performance, I never get tired of watching it,” he gushed.
Ritchard played Hook, mesmerising the young Walken and inspiring his love for the tale, which was the part he could luckily step into decades later, singing and dancing his way through terrifying children, and becoming a part of the vast universe of its adaptations.
