Why Christopher Walken spent a movie shoot farting into a tape recorder: “That is not not true”
Christopher Walken is a weird guy – or, at least, that’s what he wants the world to think, given the amount of oddball things he’s said and done on movie sets over the years. Plenty of Walken’s co-stars have gotten mileage out of telling stories about his bizarre antics and pranks or simply from making impressions of his inimitable vocal delivery.
How accurate are these tales of strangely-cadenced wackiness, though? Well, if you ask Walken himself, he tends to deny them. But then you have to ask yourself something: why would a fellow actor tell a lie as absurdly specific as ‘Walken spent a whole movie shoot farting into a tape recorder’?
Few actors are as beloved for their perceived eccentricities as Walken, a star who has forged a career for six decades as Hollywood’s favourite intimidatingly unusual screen presence. He has played a host of genuinely terrifying villains but also almost as many charmingly quirky weirdos. Naturally, each is imbued with his unmistakable line delivery, which finds pauses and emphases where most people would never think to put them.
According to Walken, though, his delivery isn’t an affectation. Instead, it’s the result of growing up in New York City with a German father and a Glaswegian mother. So, for one of his parents, English was a second language. Does this make a certain kind of Walken-y sense? Maybe.
Either way, Walken’s propensity for offscreen goofiness has also become legendary over the decades. Vanessa Ferlito claimed he requested her cat be brought to set so he could play with it between takes, while Jay Mohr said he waxed lyrical to him about how great it would be if humans had tails. Mohr said the eccentric star exclaimed, “People could tell when you were angry. They’d go, ‘Get back. Look out. Don’t mess with Chris today. Look at his tail!”
However, Walken’s most well-known on-set prank is his birthday trick. Several co-stars, including Seann William Scott and Maggie Q, have claimed Walken will walk around looking sad until someone asks him what’s wrong. At that point, he will pretend it’s his birthday, and people have forgotten his special day, even though it’s very much not his birthday. He’ll then revel in the inevitability of an impromptu celebration being organised, complete with cake and singing. In a Reddit AMA, Q said she called Walken out on his prank after he pulled it on the set of Balls of Fury, but he didn’t look contrite – he simply laughed to himself like a child.
Undoubtedly, the strangest thing Walken has ever been accused of doing, though, happened on the set of the abysmal 2003 buddy comedy Kangaroo Jack. While starring opposite Jerry O’Connell, Anthony Anderson, and a poorly rendered CGI kangaroo with a fondness for rapping, Walken supposedly wandered around the set holding a microcassette recorder. Anderson told Vulture that the iconic Deer Hunter star began farting into the recorder, then playing the recording while O’Connell and Anderson were trying to shoot scenes. He just wanted them to ruin their takes by laughing, you see.
As a bemused Anderson confessed, “It worked. It’s hard to keep a straight face when you’re listening to Christopher Walken’s flatulence on a soundstage in Australia.” Walken, though, chose to deny, deny, deny, flatly assuring the interviewer, “That is not not true.”
