Christopher Walken
Christopher Walken
Christopher Walkenis an American actor who has appeared in more than 100 films and television shows, including Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, The Dogs of War, The Dead Zone, A View to a Kill, Batman Returns, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Sleepy Hollow, Catch Me If You Can, Hairspray, Seven Psychopaths, and the first three Prophecy films, as well as music videos by many popular recording artists. Walken has received a number of awards and nominations during his career, including winning...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth31 March 1943
CityAstoria, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I've made movies that I thought were good. I've made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you're in a movie and you think, I wish more people saw that - because you're good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that's show business.
I was sort of a jack-of-all-trades in show business for a long time. I was a singer and a dancer, and then I got a job as an actor.
I think early on I knew what I was going to do and it was based a lot on familiarity but it was also because I didn't have a lot of skills. There was nothing I wanted t be. I didn't want to be a doctor. I wanted to be in show business.
I come from a show-business family, so wanting to become an actor never crossed my mind. It was just a part of my life.
I think that if I had grown up and had been in show business and the movies twenty five, thirty years earlier, I think I would have made a lot more musical movies.
My life has been wonderful. Everybody has to be a little lucky, I think.
I've always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre, and that's really where my training is.
As an actor, I'm rather hit and miss; I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn't.
I was born in America but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe. Many people in my neighborhood hardly bothered to learn English.
Improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing. That's a kind of paradoxical thing about improvising.
I've been very fortunate, because I've been involved in things that very often lead to obscurity. I was in some pictures that were not successful whatsoever. I think people admire persistence. People notice that I'm still there.
Sometimes a certain innocence is good, but not about yourself.
It's very bizarre though when you get hired and then the director will say, "I know how this goes." And you're thinking, "Wait a minute, I thought that I was doing this" but basically what they really want, especially if they wrote it, is they want you to do it as they imagined it. It's virtually impossible.
I don't think I'd be a good director because people would ask me, you know, "What is it? What's going on here? Where should I put the camera?" Or, "What's my motivation?" And I would say, "Do whatever you want!"