The performance Christopher Walken will always regret: “I fucked up”
Christopher Walken is one of Hollywood’s finest, but for a long time, he was almost solely relegated to the world of supporting actors. Though the leading man, he still made a major impact on the movie-making world. But in the 1990s, finally his time came to step up. Yet when he did, Walken himself thought he faltered.
The pressure must have been immense. After decades, starting his career back in the 1960s, his graduation to leading man in the 1990s must have felt like the marathon he’d been training his whole life for. Having built a great reputation through his supporting roles, working alongside some of the best actors around and winning over some of the most powerful directors, it surely must have felt like all eyes were on him when he came to proving his worth in the spotlight.
It was a powerful project, too – King Of New York. Directed by Abel Ferrara, Walken was stepping into his world of New York neo-noirs and into the world of dark, gritty crime dramas where his ability to play the tense, moody protagonist could be shown perfectly. But after it was filmed and out there, Walken’s hindsight on the project was that he couldn’t done better.
“No, I don’t think so,” Walken replied plainly when asked if he thought King Of New York was his finest work. “It should have been my best work,” he said before admitting, “but I fucked up.”
Talking to Total Film in 2004, with years of distance from the project to critique his work, Walken felt like he’d made his character, Frank White, too 2D. He didn’t have enough nuance or dimension to be a truly great performance, as the actor explained, “I felt that I didn’t give Frank enough complexity and perspective. You don’t see enough anguish in his face and the things that drive him to do what he does.”
White is a complex figure. He’s a drug lord, yes, but he’s a drug lord with somewhat of a moral conscience. As he’s gunning down and wiping out another cartel, he’s partially doing it because he disagrees with their actions, like trafficking, ethically and morally. It’s not all because he wants to be the ultimate NYC dealer, and Walken felt like his face never quite conveyed that.
“I’m not satisfied that I did justice to him,” he said. Losing track of the point behind the person, he added, “Both myself and the director, Abel Ferrara, worked hard at creating a mysterious edge to Frank’s personality, but we lost his motivation and a sense of where he was coming from.”
But while hindsight is 20/20, rarely are we afforded the chance to fix these things. “I wish I had another chance to play him because I would have completely altered my performance,” he said. But unfortunately, unless they fancy remaking the 1990 film with a now 81 year old lead, the chance to live up to the performance he thought he let down is long gone.
