What was the first movie actor Christopher Walken starred in?
For almost 60 years, Christopher Walken has been one of the most uniquely engaging names in cinema, utilising his distinctive wild-eyed charisma and lifelong love of dance as the foundations for a stellar career that puts him right up there with the industry’s greatest-ever character actors.
That’s not to say he hasn’t proven himself as a leading man, but it’s telling that so many of Walken’s best and most memorable performances have come when he isn’t leading the line. Those piercing eyes and angular features would have kept him gainfully employed regardless of his bespoke flourishes, which have only served to enhance his legend.
If there’s an opportunity to dance onscreen, then Walken is guaranteed to take it. It doesn’t feel like a recurring joke or a self-indulgence, either, with any cursory search for ‘Christopher Walken dancing’ focused more on the great films – and classic music video – in which he’s busted moves, rather than throwing up a Nicolas Cage-level stack of memes.
There’s also his line delivery, which has made him a favoured target of impressionists for decades. Nobody spouts dialogue like Walken, and it’s not as if he’s putting on an affectation for the sake of it; that’s just the way he talks, and it’s become every bit as integral to his legacy as the work he’s done in front of the cameras that’s yielded countless awards, including an Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
It’s a widely accepted rule of celluloid that films with Christopher Walken tend to be much better than films without Christopher Walken, but everybody has to start somewhere. For the star, who was already a relatively experienced stage performer before he upgraded to features, that debut came in 1966.
What was Christopher Walken’s first movie?
Having trodden the boards in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Walken was almost a decade into his professional acting career before he appeared in a movie, which ended up being the last time he’d lent his name to a feature for three years.
The circumstances weren’t particularly high-profile, with the novice being welcomed into the movie world by way of a made-for-TV film that screened on Hallmark. It did at least play to his background, though, with Barefoot in Athens adapted from Maxwell Anderson’s play of the same name.
Regaling the final days of Socrates, Peter Ustinov plays the ancient Greek philosopher who finds himself charged with crimes relating to his teachings. Facing the death penalty, he finds an unexpected stay of execution when Spartan forces occupy the city.
Making his film debut as Lamprocles, Socrates’ oldest son, a young Christopher Walken, took fifth billing in the cast, which wasn’t bad for a first-timer, all things considered. It was a supporting role in a TV-only movie, but he’d gotten his foot in the door nonetheless.
Not that he was immediately in demand as a would-be movie star, with Walken not making his second outing in a movie until 1969, when Robert Frank’s drama Me and My Brother and John Hirsch’s made-for-TV retelling of The Three Musketeers saw him notch two screen appearances in the same calendar year for the first time.
Technically, Me and My Brother was the first theatrically-released feature Walken added to his filmography on either side of his made-for-TV adventures, but Barefoot in Athens remains enshrined in history as his movie debut.
